Function similar to head() in Matlab

I'm simply trying to find out if there in Matlab is a simple equivalent to head() in R? It should display/print the top 5 rows of an array. So given the following table

var1 = transpose(1:6);
var2 = transpose(2:7);
aa = table(var1,var2);

I am looking for a funtion xx that produces the same as:

aa(1:5,:)

ans =

var1    var2
____    ____

1       2   
2       3   
3       4   
4       5   
5       6

something like:

xx(aa)

I could of course keep using the indexes above, but it would be more convenient with a function. I have used head() extensively in R.

Solution

If all you want is the top few rows, then just type mydata[1:5,] .

I use the following toy, from a certain someone's :-) cgwtools package, which allows you to specify how many items to display and has an option to skip a few elements if desired. As it happens, I chose not to retain dimensions, to make it easier to examine a list object. Feel free to take this code & modify to your needs (e.g. remove the part which returns the last numel elements if you only want the "head" of your data).

short <-function (x = seq(1, 20), numel = 4, skipel = 0, ynam = deparse(substitute(x))) 
{
    ynam <- as.character(ynam)
    ynam <- gsub(" ", "", ynam)
    if (is.list(x)) 
        x <- unlist(t(x))
    if (2 * numel >= length(x)) {
        print(x)
    }
    else {
        frist = 1 + skipel
        last = numel + skipel
        cat(paste(ynam, "[", frist, "] thru ", ynam, "[", last, 
            "]\n", sep = ""))
        print(x[frist:last])
        cat(" ... \n")
        cat(paste(ynam, "[", length(x) - numel - skipel + 1, 
            "] thru ", ynam, "[", length(x) - skipel, "]\n", 
            sep = ""))
        print(x[(length(x) - numel - skipel + 1):(length(x) - 
            skipel)])
    }
}