Integer encoding

Question

I am trying to figure out how to encode integers based on given parameters. For example, I am given the table:

integer = 0, encoding is 3294 

integer = 1, encoding is 128 

integer = 2, encoding is 2098

etc.

How would I go about doing this? I have looked at the function dec2bin, but it's not exactly what I need. My input would be a vector, say x = [ 2 1 0 ] and the output would be the vector y = [2 0 9 8 1 2 8 3 2 9 4].

Any advice or help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Encoding may not be the best word to describe this. This answer is just a direction in your search.

I would have a look at any dictionary, hashtable or map data structures. Code below is based on solution described in this post

c = containers.Map;
c('0') = 3294; 
c('1') = 128;
c('2') = 2098;
keys(c) 
values(c)

You may need to add proper usings and maybe use integers types directly to remove casts and conversion overhead.

Answer 2

If you represent the encoding table as a cell array enc with two columns (each row contains an integer and its corresponding encoding string), you can use the following neat one-liner:

y = str2num(cell2mat(arrayfun(@(v)enc{find([enc{:, 1}] == v), 2}', x(:), 'UniformOutput', 0)))'

Explanation

The above solution actually does three things:

1. Substitutes each integer in the input vector x with the corresponding encoding string from enc:

   arrayfun(@(v)enc{find([enc{:, 1}] == v), 2}', x(:), 'UniformOutput', 0)
   

2. Concatenate all strings together into one column using cell2mat.

3. Converts it back into a numerical vector using str2num. str2num is applied on rows, so each character (digit) is treated individually.

Example

enc = {0, '3294'; 1, '128'; 2, '2098'};
x = [2, 1, 0];
y = str2num(cell2mat(arrayfun(@(v)enc{find([enc{:, 1}] == v), 2}', x(:), 'UniformOutput', 0)))'

The result is:

y =
     2     0     9     8     1     2     8     3     2     9     4