How can I this efficiently? common rows in two data sets

[Rick Niles]

OK I have a problem I hit a lot and I haven't come up with a good way to 
do this Octave.  I was wondering if there's a good way to do this or if 
it's a opportunity for another built-in oct-file if there's not a good 
way to do it with the current set of the functions.

I have two data files, each has one column that represents "time".  But 
they don't start and stop at the same time and either may have random 
drop-outs (no-data) for any amount of time.   The obvious thing to do 
make a common data set that only contains the times (rows) for which I 
have data from both sets.

I tried using "intersection()" on the time columns and doing a for loop 
with "find()" for each time value one at a time to get the indexes that 
have common time, but on a large data set it's really slow and obviously 
not very efficient.

As lots of people use Octave to process real data sets it seems like 
there should be a good way to do this.

Any ideas?

   Thanks,
   Rick Niles.



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------