Valid Combinations of Unlike Classes

Matrices and arrays can be composed of elements of almost any MATLAB^® data type as long as all elements in the matrix are of the same type. If you do include elements of unlike classes when constructing a matrix, MATLAB converts some elements so that all elements of the resulting matrix are of the same type.

Data type conversion is done with respect to a preset precedence of classes. The following table shows the five classes you can concatenate with an unlike type without generating an error. The one exception in the table is that you cannot convert logical values to the char data type.

TYPE	character	integer	single	double	logical
character	character	character	character	character	invalid
integer	character	integer	integer	integer	integer
single	character	integer	single	single	single
double	character	integer	single	double	double
logical	invalid	integer	single	double	logical

For example, concatenating a double and single matrix always yields a matrix of type single. MATLAB converts the double element to single to accomplish this.

Related Topics

• Combining Unlike Integer Types
• Combining Integer and Noninteger Data
• Add or Delete Cells in Cell Array
• Concatenation Examples
• Concatenating Objects of Different Classes