MATLAB how to plot a discrete function without vertical lines, only levels

Question

I have something like this:

t = [-1 0 1 2 3 4 5];
ft= [ 0 0 0 0 1 1 1];

I want to plot only horizontal levels high\low without vertical lines:

Answer 1

If you don't mind the vertical lines, it's really simple to just use the stairs(x,t) function. Otherwise you can create your own function that deals with pairs of points to generate lines and plot them all individually using hold on.

function stairs2(x,y)
    hold on;
    for i=1:length(x)-1
        plot(x(i:i+1),[y(i) y(i)]);
    end
    hold off;
end

Then just call stairs2(x,t) as per your example above, and set appropriate zoom/axes.

Alternately, this is a different way that only uses ONE call to plot:

function stairs2(x,y)
    for i=1:length(x)-1
        A(:,i) = [x(i) x(i+1)];
        B(:,i) = [y(i) y(i)];
    end
    plot(A,B,'b');
end