MATLAB: How to find a file containing a particular string in a given directory in MATLAB 7.13(R2011b)

directoryfilefindMATLABsearchstring

I want to find the file that contains the string 'xxx' from a particular directory. How do I do the search?

Best Answer

You can achieve this in MATLAB by navigating to the “Find Files…” option under the “Edit” tab. You can enter the required string and search for the string in the files in a particular directory and also choose to search in the subfolders.
You can also open “Find Files…” window with the following keystrokes Ctrl+Shift+F.
If you would like to do this programmatically, the following is a simple script which performs this:
directory = '<Directory path>';      % Full path of the directory to be searched in
filesAndFolders = dir(directory);     % Returns all the files and folders in the directory
filesInDir = filesAndFolders(~([filesAndFolders.isdir]));  % Returns only the files in the directory                    
stringToBeFound = '<Specify the string you would like to be searched for>';
numOfFiles = length(filesInDir);
i=1;
while(i<=numOfFiles)
      filename = filesInDir(i).name;                              % Store the name of the file
      fid = fopen(filename);
      while(~feof(fid))                                           % Execute till EOF has been reached
          contentOfFile = fgetl(fid);                             % Read the file line-by-line and store the content
          found = strfind(contentOfFile,stringToBeFound);         % Search for the stringToBeFound in contentOfFile
          if ~isempty(found)
              foundString = strcat('Found in file------', filename);
              disp(foundString);
              break;
          end   
      end
      fclose(fid);                                                % Close the file
      i = i+1;
end
Please note that this script does not search for the term in the sub-directories.
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