Draw lines between points

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Emi
Emi on 4 Dec 2013
Edited: Walter Roberson on 2 May 2016
I have a text file ("coordinates.txt") that contains x and y coordinates of points.
File looks like this:
11 44 2 9
11 44 5 8
2 1 6 11
2 1 10 3
I need to draw lines between (11, 44) to (2, 9), (11, 44) to (5, 8), (2, 1) to (6, 11), and (2, 1) to (10, 3).
I can do this by manually like:
x = [11 11 2 1; 2, 5, 6, 10];
y = [44 44 1 1; 9 8 11 3];
plot (x, y).
But the actual file is quite long and I need to "automate" this process.
I tried:
load coordinates.txt;
edit coordinates.txt;
x1= [coordinates(:, 1); coordinates(:, 3)];
y1 = [coordinates(:, 2); coordinates(:, 4)];
plot (x1, y1).
It gives me lines drawn from (11, 44) to (2, 9), (2, 9) to (5, 8), (5, 8) to (6, 11), (6, 11) to (10, 3).
Could anyone help?

Accepted Answer

dpb
dpb on 4 Dec 2013
Simply read in the array as it is in the file, then if
m =
11 44 2 9
11 44 5 8
2 1 6 11
2 1 10 3
for instance,
>> x=[m(:,1) m(:,3)];
>> y=[m(:,2) m(:,4)];
>> plot(x',y')
Or, you can do w/o the temporaries x, y of course if there's no other need to separate.
NB: I'm presuming the actual example x
x = [11 11 2 1; 2, 5, 6, 10];
contains a typo given the content of the file in that the '1' on the first line should also be a '2'...
  1 Comment
Emi
Emi on 4 Dec 2013
It worked!! Thank you! And yes, it was a typo.

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More Answers (2)

Kelly Kearney
Kelly Kearney on 4 Dec 2013
Matlab considers each column passed to plot to represent a separate line segment. So just transpose your data:
plot(x1', y1')

Bandar
Bandar on 2 Jun 2014
Edited: Bandar on 2 Jun 2014
In this case you better build your own function to draw a line given two points.
function [] = drawLine(p1, p2)
theta = atan2( p2(2) - p1(2), p2(1) - p1(1));
r = sqrt( (p2(1) - p1(1))^2 + (p2(2) - p1(2))^2);
line = 0:0.01: r;
x = p1(1) + line*cos(theta);
y = p1(2) + line*sin(theta);
plot(x, y)
in the main function do the following
>> drawLine([0 0], [-5 5])
>> hold on
>> drawLine([0 0], [5 5])
For many points just put `drawLine` in a loop. Hope this helps

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