How to find out if a logical array is all zeros?
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I have a logical array that is 100x1 logical. sometimes it contains a mix of numbers and sometimes it contains all 0s.
How would i go about making an if statement that checks to see if all 100x1 is 0s and if all 0s = do something
I thought i was correct in using any command but im not sure that works correctly for me..
Thanks!
Accepted Answer
John D'Errico
on 3 Feb 2022
Edited: John D'Errico
on 3 Feb 2022
any does work, with a slight tweak. But you could also use all, or sum, or nnz, or even find. There are certainly many ways.
if ~any(X)
...
end
if all(~X)
...
end
if sum(x) == 0
...
end
if numel(find(x)) == 0
...
end
if nnz(x) == 0
...
end
Any of those tools would suffice.
3 Comments
James Tursa
on 15 Jan 2025
Note that any( ) is possibly written to short-circuit in the background, as these timings suggest:
x = false(1,100000000);
y = x;
x(end) = true; % last element is true
y(1) = true; % first element is true
timeit(@()~any(x)) % has to examine all of the elements to find the true one?
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
Walter Roberson
on 15 Jan 2025
No, it is just very fast at checking from the beginning of the array.
Some of my tests on y show times on the order of 1e-9 instead of 0, by the way.
x = false(1,100000000);
y = x;
x(end) = true; % last element is true
y(1) = true; % first element is true
timeit(@()~any(x)) % has to examine all of the elements to find the true one?
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
y(5000) = true;
timeit(@()~any(y)) % has to examine all of the elements to find the true one?
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
y(1) = true;
timeit(@()~any(y))
timeit(@()~any(y))
timeit(@()~any(y))
y(1) = false;
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
timeit(@()~any(y)) % once first element is examined the answer is known
More Answers (4)
William Rose
on 3 Feb 2022
@MKM,
If A is a vector,
sum(abs(A))
will be zero, or not, of all the elements are zero, or not.
If A is a 2D array, do
sum(sum(abs(A)))
0 Comments
Steven Lord
on 3 Feb 2022
For a vector, all with one input will work.
x = ones(10, 1);
all(x > 0) % true
For a non-vector array you probably want to specify a dimension. In recent releases, you can specify a vector of dimensions on which to operate or you can specify 'all' as the dimension to operate on all the dimensions no matter how many there are.
x = ones(10, 10);
all(x > 0) % Only operate on dimension 1
all(x > 0, 'all') % Operate on dimensions 1 and 2
x = ones(10, 10, 10);
all(x > 0, [1 3]) % Operate on dimensions 1 and 3
all(x > 0, 'all') % Operate on dimensions 1, 2, and 3
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