MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Preallocate Memory for Cell Array

This example shows how to initialize and allocate memory for a cell array.

Cell arrays do not require completely contiguous memory. However, each cell requires

contiguous memory, as does the cell array header that MATLAB creates to describe the

array. For very large arrays, incrementally increasing the number of cells or the number

of elements in a cell results in Out of Memory errors.

Initialize a cell array by calling the cell function, or by assigning to the last element. For

example, these statements are equivalent:

C = cell(25,50);

C{25,50} = [];

MATLAB creates the header for a 25-by-50 cell array. However, MATLAB does not allocate

any memory for the contents of each cell.

See Also

cell

Related Examples

• “Reshaping and Rearranging Arrays”


• “How MATLAB Allocates Memory” on page 29-12

12 Cell Arrays