What does x = x(:) mean in matlab, where x is a vector?

Question

This is a hard question to google. I am new to Matlab and have seen the following statement, but I can't see how it does anything. What doe x = x(:) do?

Answer 1

: is the colon operator. In this context, it reshapes x to a one-dimensional column vector.

So this code:

x = [ 1 3
      2 4 ];

x = x(:);

disp(x)

results in:

1
2
3
4