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Finding Nonzero Elements in a Vector

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Sophie Culhane
Sophie Culhane on 20 Sep 2020
Closed: MATLAB Answer Bot on 20 Aug 2021
In a assignment I am working on, we are tasked with writing a MATLAB function that takes as input a nonempty vector v and returns the product of the nonzero elements in the vector. If there are no nonzero elements, a value of 1 is returned. As of now, I have a working program that calculates the correct answer, however it computes the product of all elements, instead of all nonzero elements. I am asking for help on how to make this simple change in my program. Below is what I have so far.
function prod = ex1(v)
%
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vLength = length(v);
prod = 1;
CurrentPosition = 1;
for CurrentPosition = 1:vLength
prod = prod * v(CurrentPosition);
CurrentPosition = CurrentPosition + 1;
end
  1 Comment
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 20 Sep 2020
By the way, the code can be vectorized to less than 20 characters (excluding the "function" line.)

Answers (1)

James Tursa
James Tursa on 20 Sep 2020
Edited: James Tursa on 20 Sep 2020
You need to wrap this statement with an if-test and only execute it if v(CurrentPosition) is non-zero:
prod = prod * v(CurrentPosition);
Also, get rid of the following line. You should not be manually altering the for-loop index variable within the loop:
CurrentPosition = CurrentPosition + 1;
You can get rid of this line also, since it doesn't actually accomplish anything useful.
CurrentPosition = 1;

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