How does one use bar() to show multiple bars for a single X-axis value?

bar( [1,2], [10,20;30,40] ); draws a bar graph with two X ticks, 1 and 2. At X=1 there are two bars of height 10 and 20, and at X=2 there are two bars of height 30 and 40.

But what if I want a bar graph with one Xtick showing two bar of height 10 and 20. bar( [1], [10,20] ) doesn't work: "X must be same length as Y"

Is there some trick to getting bar() to work in this case? My code has to work with a wide range of datasets, some of which have the one-xtick case.

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

bar([10 20; NaN NaN])
set(gca,'xlim',[0 2],'xtick',1)