MATLAB: How to extract only part of a file name

Question

I am trying to extract a file but i don´t want to extract it´s entire name. For example:

In

inv_1000061014358_20150424_115235

I only want to extract inv_1000061014358.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!!!!

Answer 1

Presuming the numeric substring isn't the same length always,

ix=strfind(s,'_');  % get the underscore locations
t=s(1:ix(2)-1);     % return the substring up to 2nd underscore

One can also use find to only get the first two locations; would be handy if it also had the ability to return an N th argument instead of just first or last N; then wouldn't have to use the intermediate index vector.

Or, one can use regexp