chunkify

Splits a vector or cell array into evenly-sized chunks.

C = CHUNKIFY(DATA, CHUNKSIZE)

Turns a matrix DATA into chunks of data with CHUNKSIZE elements in each cell entry of C. If DATA's size is not evenly divisible by CHUNKSIZE, the last entry in C will contain fewer items.

Examples:

chunkify([1 2 3 4], 2) --> {[1 2] [3 4]}
chunkify([1 2 3 4 5], 2) --> {[1 2] [3 4] [5]}

chunkify({'1' '2' '3' '4'}, 2) --> {{'1' '2'} {'3' '4'}}

Motivating scenario:

I wrote this function because I needed to process a lot of data in separate chunks, sometimes to have different machines run each chunk, sometimes to just load in chunks of the data files so I could balance I/O and memory constraints. In both these cases, I found it handy to have this simple function to break up my index vector. Because the number of data items was not always an exact multiple of my desired chunk size, I used this function instead of Matlab's built-in RESHAPE (putting one chunk per row, for example).

TODO:
If DATA is multi-dimensional, the dimension on which to chunkify is given by DIM.
chunkify([1 2 3 4], 2, 2) --> {[1 2] [3 4]}
chunkify([1 2 3 4], 2, 1) --> {[1 2 3 4]}
chunkify([1 2; 3 4], 2, 1) --> {[1 2] [3 4]}