Writing a loop that works for any value of N - matlab

Question

I have a code for a 1D heat equation. Im trying to format a for loop so that the A matrix will follow a certain pattern of 1 -2 1 down the entire diagonal of a matrix that could be infinite. The pattern starts to take shape when I mess around with the initialized count at the beginning of the for loop but this changes the size of the matrix which fails the rest of the code.
My current code is below. The commented A matrix edits are what it should be.
N = 5;
%A(2,1:3) = [1 -2 1];
%A(3,2:4) = [1 -2 1];
%A(4,3:5) = [1 -2 1];
%A(5,4:6) = [1 -2 1];
A = zeros(N+1,N+1);
A(1,1) = 1;
for count=N:N+1
A(count+1,count:count+2) = [1 -2 1];
end
A(N+1,N+1) = 1;

Answer 1

In Matlab you can often avoid loops. In this case you can get the desired result with 2D convolution:
>> N = 6;
>> A = [1 zeros(1,N-1); conv2(eye(N-2), [1 -2 1]); zeros(1,N-1) 1]
A =
1 0 0 0 0 0
1 -2 1 0 0 0
0 1 -2 1 0 0
0 0 1 -2 1 0
0 0 0 1 -2 1
0 0 0 0 0 1
Or, depending on what you want,
>> A = conv2(eye(N), [1 -2 1], 'same')
A =
-2 1 0 0 0 0
1 -2 1 0 0 0
0 1 -2 1 0 0
0 0 1 -2 1 0
0 0 0 1 -2 1
0 0 0 0 1 -2

Answer 2

There are many simple ways of creating this matrix.
Your loop can be amended as follows:
N = 5;
A = zeros(N+1,N+1);
A(1,1) = 1;
for row = 2:N
A(row, row-1:row+1) = [1 -2 1];
end
A(N+1,N+1) = 1;
I've renamed count to row, we're indexing each row (from 2 to N, skipping the first and last rows), then finding with row-1:row+1 the three indices for that row that you want to address.
Directly indexing the diagonal and off-diagonal elements. Diagonal elements for an NxN matrix are 1:N+1:end. This is obviously more complex, I'd prefer the loop:
N = 6;
A = zeros(N,N);
A(1:N+1:end) = -2;
A(2:N+1:end-2*N) = 1; % skip last row
A(2*N+2:N+1:end) = 1; % skip first row
A(1,1) = 1;
A(N,N) = 1;
Using diag. We need to special-case the first and last rows:
N = 6;
A = diag(-2*ones(N,1),0) + diag(ones(N-1,1),1) + diag(ones(N-1,1),-1);
A(1,1:2) = [1,0];
A(end,end-1:end) = [0,1];