Setting a specific number of tick marks on MATLAB plot

Question

I am trying to figure out how to set a custom number of tick marks on the x-axis of a plot I am creating in MATLAB, but I am not sure if this is possible. I saw this question that seems to be asking the same thing, but that answer wasn't helpful since

set(gca,'XTick',tickVector);

sets the location of the ticks, not the number of ticks. My code is as follows.

rangeBegin = 100000;
rangeEnd = 200000;
numberOfXTicks = 5;

plot(data(:, 1));
xAxisVals = linspace(rangeBegin, rangeEnd, numberOfXTicks);
%set(gca,'XTick',rangeBegin:rangeEnd); % Doesn't work as expected
set(gca,'XTickLabel',xAxisVals);

So in this example, I am just looking for a way to force MATLAB to create the plot with 5 ticks on the x-axis in order to match the 5 XTickLabels that I have set.

data is an array of doubles that is roughly <3000x1>.

EDIT: I should also add that I want my x-axis values to be from a separate array. The data array shown above corresponds to a time array (not shown...my bad), and each value in the data array has a corresponding value in the time array. Since I am selecting a range from the data array, I want to select the corresponding time values and use those as the x labels. But obviously I do not want 3000 time labels on my x-axis. Hopefully this is more clear.

Answer 1

numberOfXTicks = 5;

h = plot(data(:, 1));
xData = get(h,'XData');
set(gca,'Xtick',linspace(xData(1),xData(end),numberOfXTicks))