How do I concatenate binary values from 32 cells into 1 cell?

I have a 32 bit binary value in an array of size 1x32. I want to turn this array into a 1x1 with a concatenation of all the bits. How may I go about doing so?

EDIT:

I was a little vague in my initial question. To give more context, I have an input array of size and type - 188583x1 double. The rows are filled with decimal numbers. I need to convert the decimal numbers to binary numbers which will later on be used for bit-wise operations. I have tried to use dec2bin() on the entire array but that leaves me with char type data. To my knowledge, I cannot perform bit-wise operations on char type data. I explored the option of using str2num() but that takes away all leading zeros (I need to maintain my 32 bits if I want to perform bit-wise operations). So currently I have written the following:

%Importing Data
[RW,MemAddr_d] = readvars('quick4k.txt');
MemAddr_b = de2bi(MemAddr_d,'left-msb');

% Attempt to convert decimal array to Binary Array
[rows,cols] = size(MemAddr_b);
padding = zeros(rows,(32-cols));
MemAddr_32b = horzcat(padding,MemAddr_b);

This gives me all 188583 rows but in 32 separate columns. I would like to concatenate the data in those columns to form a 188583x1 array. If there is a better way to go about doing this, please do let me know! Thanks!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

V = rand(1,32) < 0.3;  %example data

As_Scalar = sum(V .* 2.^(31:-1:0));

disp(dec2bin(As_Scalar, 32))   %cross-check

[Oscar Rodrigues]

Hi! Thanks for the quick reply! This works for 1 row but when I try applying it to all the rows of my matrix, I don't quite get the expected result. But maybe I just did a poor job of implementing it to all rows, please see the edit I made above for more info. on my program.

[Walter Roberson]

dec2bin(YourArrayOfNumbers, 32) - '0'

will give you a numel(YourArrayOfNumbers) by 32 array of double, each element being 0 or 1.

For bitwise operations, you can do them directly using functions such as bitget()... though it is more difficult than it should be to set multiple bits within the same number.

[Walter Roberson]

It is common to convert to vectors of bits for a couple of cases:

1. Matters having to do with watermarking or embedding information in an image or audio, in which case you are typically wanting to know the individual bits as a stream; in such cases you often do not do much with the bits other than insert them
2. For communications purposes such as FSK modulation or USRP; in such cases, operations such as error correcting codes might involve more extensive mathematical operations

You might expect that for encryption purposes that you would be dealing with bits, but typically most encryption algorithms are written in terms of bytes.

In cases other than the two mentioned, other than for cases I have forgotten / overlooked, it is more common to leave the data as bytes or words and do bitwise operations on those, such as using bitor() or bitset() .

[Oscar Rodrigues]

dec2bin(YourArrayOfNumbers, 32) - '0'

Doesn't give me what I need though, since its in 32 separate columns. I need all the data to be 1 single column. Is there any way to do this?

[Walter Roberson]

You want separate bits in order to be able to do bitwise operations, so you need to be able to index by row and by bit number. That calls for a 2D array unless you use cell arrays,

num2cell(dec2bin(YourArrayOfNumbers, 32) - '0',2)

In that limited sense, you would get a something-by-1 array (a column). But it would be a cell array, and you cannot do bitwise operations on a cell array: you would have to access the contents of the cell array using {} indexing to be able to access the bits.