How do I rename the .mat files in a for loop?

I have 1000 .mat files. for example, angle1.mat, angle2.mat, angle3.mat.....angle1000.mat. I want to rename these respective files as angle501.mat, angle502.mat, angle503.mat.....angle1500.mat. Something like I wanted to add 500 to the number.

S = dir('*.mat');

fileNames = {S.name};

for k=1:length(fileNames)

H=fileNames{k};

movefile(H, sprintf('angle%d.mat', k));

end

I think we need to change something inside the sprintf, but don't know how to do it. May I know how to solve the issue?

Thanks.

Answer 1

[DGM]

Since your filenames all have variable-length numbers in them, they won't sort like you expect. If you've already run this code, your files have probably been renamed out of order.

Consider that you have the files

test_1.mat

test_2.mat

test_10.mat

test_20.mat

test_100.mat

test_200.mat

Using dir() will return the filenames in this order:

test_1.mat

test_10.mat

test_100.mat

test_2.mat

test_20.mat

test_200.mat

and then you'll rename them in the wrong order.

There are ways to deal with this. You could use this tool to sort the filenames:

S = dir('angle*.mat'); % use a more restrictive expression
fileNames = natsortfiles({S.name}); % sort the names
for k=1:length(fileNames)
    H = fileNames{k};
    movefile(H, sprintf('angle_%04d.mat', k+500));
end

Note that this simply assumes that the file names contain the numbers matching the vector k.

Alternatively, you could extract the numbers from the filenames and add to them.

S = dir('angle*.mat'); % use a more restrictive expression
fileNames = {S.name}; % unsorted names

filenums = regexp(fileNames,'(?<=[^\d])\d+(?=\.)','match'); 
filenums = str2double(vertcat(filenums{:}));
for k=1:length(fileNames)
    H = fileNames{k};
    movefile(H, sprintf('angle_%04d.mat',filenums(k)+500));
end

Note that in both cases, the output filenames are zero-padded to a fixed length. This makes them easily sortable.

[Anu]

Thanks so much for the details and your prompt reply, @DGM! I really appreciate it.