How can i read in and work on multiple files with the similar name structure but different from each other by one or two characters in their name?

Hi,

I have a 200 .nc files with name : OCS_iso1.cam.h2.00X-Y.nc with X and Y variables in the names, X=(01:01:100) and Y=(01:01:12).

I was wondering if there's a way to read in the files without loading them one by one and also read information from these files (note that all the arrays in these .NC files have same names) (example: lets say there is an array called lev(24*19*66)) and work with them such as: summing them up or taking average, etc.

thank you

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

"I was wondering if there's a way to read in the files without loading them one by one"

No, you need to read each of them. You can create a loop that names them one by one automatically, however

for this_x = 1:100
  for this_y = 1:12
    this_file = sprintf('OCS_iso1.cam.h2.00%02d-%02d.nc', this_x, this_y );
    data = ncread(this_file, ....);
  end
end

[Joseph]

Thanks, Walter Roberson

it was exactly what I wanted. I just made a slight change (adding index) to read in all files as below:

for this_x = 1:13

    for this_y=1:12

      this_file{this_x,this_y}= sprintf('OCS_iso1.cam.h2.00%02d-%02d.nc', this_x, this_y );

   data{this_x,this_y}= ncread(this_file{this_x,this_y},...);
         end
  end;

[Walter Roberson]

As a matter of programming convention, I use this_* to refer to the one particular value that I am working on now, and I use a more collective name to refer to the collection of names. So in the above if I did not need to know what the file names were later on, then

for this_x = 1:13
  for this_y=1:12
    this_file = sprintf('OCS_iso1.cam.h2.00%02d-%02d.nc', this_x, this_y );
    data{this_x,this_y}= ncread(this_file,...);
  end
end

and if I did need to know the file names later on,

for this_x = 1:13
  for this_y=1:12
    this_file = sprintf('OCS_iso1.cam.h2.00%02d-%02d.nc', this_x, this_y );
    filenames{this_x, this_y} = this_file;
    data{this_x,this_y}= ncread(this_file,...);
  end
end