Generating a vector of symbolic variables in Matlab

I want to generate a symbolic vector p, with each element a symbolic variable:

p = [p1; p2; ...; pn];

I don't want to type syms p1 p2 ... because I have ~100 such variables. Is there a way to generate them automatically?

Solution

Yup. Use sym like so:

p = sym('p', [100 1]);

This syntax will create a vector of symbolic variables where p is the first character followed by an integer. We wish to create 100 of them, and this will give you a symbolic vector from p1 up to p100, or however many you want. Simply change the 100 to whatever number you want.

This is what p looks like: