help with "dir" command

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ludvikjahn
ludvikjahn on 25 Feb 2015
Edited: Stephen23 on 25 Feb 2015
good morning I have a problem with the command "dir":
I want to find some files which names are f.e. : 10.txt,11.txt,12.txt, etc. and list them within a cell or an array
I tried with this:
for i=10:20
file = dir(fullfile(open_folder, ['*' i '*' '.txt']))
end
neither
file(i) = dir(fullfile(open_folder, ['*' i '*' '.txt']))
works (mismatched dimension or something similar).
the resulting structure is just the file with the last numerical value (i.e. '20.txt' in this case)
is there a possibility to have a cell, or a matrix with all the files found?
Thanks

Accepted Answer

Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 25 Feb 2015

More Answers (1)

Stephen23
Stephen23 on 25 Feb 2015
Edited: Stephen23 on 25 Feb 2015
Rather than doing this in a loop, why not use dir 's ability to return multiple matches:
out = dir(fullfile(open_folder,'*.txt'))
This is much neater, faster, and less likely to have bugs than trying to do this in a loop. The usage of fullfile is good code though, so we will keep that!
If required you can sort/filter the strings in out as well, to remove other files that you do not want. You could use regexp for this.
  2 Comments
ludvikjahn
ludvikjahn on 25 Feb 2015
Edited: ludvikjahn on 25 Feb 2015
The problem is that I have a database of many Gigabytes of files '.txt' where I have to sort them and I wanted to extract only those referred to a short period of time.
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 25 Feb 2015
The sorting takes place inside the loop? What sort of sorting are you doing (no pun intended)?

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