Colon operator

Hi! I keep getting the error "For colon operator with char operands, first and last operands must be char". with the line "for i=1:block", where block=9.

The code I'm using is as follows:

function reach_reward2(subj_num,name,block)
filename = 'C:\Users\Elizabeth\Documents\MATLAB Files\Experiment Data\' subj_num];
cd (filename)
dat=['RT1_' name '.dat'];
Data2=dload(dat);
file = [subj_num '_' name];

for i=1:block %block
  num  = ['1' '2' '3' '4' '5' '6' '7' '8' '9'];
  subj = ['RT1_' name '_' num(i) '.mov'];
  Data = movload(subj);
  combined_data = [];
and so on..

I'm confused as to what I'm doing wrong?

[Sean de Wolski]

what is block?

[Walter Roberson]

If block was a character you would get that error.

Answer 1

[Vaibhav]

You have to initialize block as a number such as 20 or 30 or whatever.

Answer 2

[Jan]

The error message looks like block is a string - a char vector. How do you call this function?

BTW, this is not efficient:

num  = ['1' '2' '3' '4' '5' '6' '7' '8' '9'];

Better:

num  = '123456789';

But the repeated definition inside the loop wastes time also. It is a good programming practize to move all repeated operations out of the loop.

Most likely sprintf('%d', i) is even better to create the number as string.