a function for computing bursts of errors

Say I have a list of 1's and 0's, each 1 representing a rare event (an
error), each 0 representing a normal event (no error).  I want to
compute the distribution of error burst lengths.  This function makes an
array where each element, one per error burst, contains the burst
length.

Now that I discovered about bool values, is there a way that I could
take advantage of boolean arrays in this function?

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function b =3D bursts(x)

  ## usage: B =3D bursts (X)
  ##
  ## Given a matrix X, return the number of bursts of different lengths.
  ##
  ## A burst of length n is a sequence of n values different from 0,
  ## delimited either by zero values or the start or end of the vector.
  ##
  ## Francesco Potort=EC <[email protected]>, 2004
  ## License: GNU GPL <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

  if (nargin !=3D 1)
    usage ("B =3D bursts (X)");
  endif

  if (!isvector(x))
    error ("bursts: x must be a vector");
  endif

  ## Make x a column vector of ones where different from 0.
  if (columns(x) !=3D 1)
    x =3D x';
  endif
  x =3D !x;

  ## Find the places where there is a 1, then compute the burst lenghts.
  b =3D diff([0;find(x);rows(x)+1])-1;

  ## Remove the zero-length bursts
  b =3D b(b>0);
endfunction
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--=20
Francesco Potort=EC (ricercatore)        Voice: +39 050 315 3058 (op.2111=
)
ISTI - Area della ricerca CNR          Fax:   +39 050 313 8091
via G. Moruzzi 1, I-56124 Pisa         Email: [email protected]
Web: http://fly.isti.cnr.it/           Key:   fly.isti.cnr.it/public.key



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