Sparse matrix ir sorting

Hi,

I am writing a MEX function and I need to know some specific information about the way sparse matrices are stored: in particular, the result of mxGetIr.

From the documentation on mxSetIr (https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/apiref/mxsetir.html) I see the following

"The ir array must be in column-major order. The ir array must define the row positions in column 1 (if any) first, then the row positions in column 2 (if any) second, and so on, through column N. Within each column, row position 1 must appear before row position 2, and so on."

Does this mean that the elements in ir array corresponding to the same column are guaranteed to go in increasing order? This was also my observation but I want to confirm whether this is necessarily the case, so I can use this property in my MEX code.

Thank you!

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

Yes, the elements in the ir array corresponding to the same column are guaranteed to go in increasing order. The indexing is 0-based, not 1-based. If you are building a sparse matrix from scratch in a mex routine, you must ensure this is the case in order to have a valid matrix.

Basically, the elements of the sparse matrix are stored in column-major order in memory ... so the ordering of the ir values for any particular column must be increasing in order for this to be the case.

[Fadime Bekmambetova]

Thank you very much! This clears up a lot of my confusions!