How can I reduce the number of digits in the colorbar?

How can I reduce the number of digits in the colorbar in a code like this:

figure(2)

pcolor(x, y, diff_tau1);

colorbar;

xlabel('x [m]')

ylabel('y [m]')

grid on

[Dyuman Joshi]

Which digits?

Since you have not included any figure in your question description, use the figure below to show which digits you want to change.

And also mention what change you want to do.

X = [1 2 3; 1 2 3; 1 2 3];
Y = X';
C = [3 4 5; 1 2 5; 5 5 5];
pcolor(X,Y,C)
colorbar

[Andrea Cesaro]

the number in the colorbar come out automatically, but there are ten significant digits and I want to reduce them, for example two or three

[Dyuman Joshi]

"but there are ten significant digits"

Can you attach your data? i.e. the values for the variables x, y and diff_tau1?

[Andrea Cesaro]

The data is quite cumbersome, but I can attach a photo of the pcolor plot:

As you see there is a lot of digits that I want eliminate.

[Dyuman Joshi]

Alright.

However, if we display the values upto only 2 or 3 significant digits after the decimal, all the values will be same (0.20 or 0.199), and that would be confusing.

[Andrea Cesaro]

Yes, but this is not important, I want to reduce the number of digits.

Answer 1

[MarKf]

You likely need something like this.

surf(1+peaks*0.00001) %obvs this is a quick and bad example, it'd have helped to have the actual data, but anyway 
cb = colorbar; %run until here to see what I mean and what changes
cbvals = get(cb,'XTick'); %nowadays cb.XTick would do the trick... let's say backwards compatibility
set(cb,'XTickLabel',sprintfc('%.3f',cbvals)); % 2 or 3

You can see above that there might be issues depending on what's your data. You could also truncate what's displayed instead of rounding (which is what sprintf does) or get the bounds and print depending on those (something like t=get(cb,'Limits'); tks = linspace(t(1),t(2),5); set(cb,'Ticks',tks); set(cb,'TickLabels',arrayfun(@(x) sprintf('%.2f',x),tks,'un',0) )

[Andrea Cesaro]

Thank you, it works in this way!