MATLAB: Is there any way to do a regex to exclude filenames with underscore from datastore

Question

I have a directory with lot of subfolders, and each folder containing HEA and DAT files.

For example, a '30001' folder directory would contain he following files:

30001.hea

30001_0001.dat

30001_000.hea

30001_0002.dat

30001_0002.hea

…

30001_0017.dat

30001_0017.hea

30001n.dat

30001n.hea

RECORDS

Furthermore, the 'RECORDS' file in '30001' directory contains the following information:

30001

30001n

30001_0001

30001_0002

30001_0003

…

0001_0017

Is there any way to do a regex to exclude anything with underscore from datastore?

Answer 1

Datastore does not support regex directly.

A potential workaround that might also be to use "*" in location specified to datastore:

>> tds = tabularTextDatastore([data_dir, filesep, '*', filesep, 'RECORDS');

This gives you a tabularTextDatastore with only the RECORDS files. You can now read in these files one-by-one and build up the actual Files property:

>> keepFiles = [];
>> while hasdata(ttds)
>>      R = read(ttds);
>>      keepFiles = [keepFiles; R(~contains(R.Var1,'_layout.hea') & ~contains(R.Var1,'.hea'),:)];
>> end

Now, you have just the files you need:

>> fds = fileDatastore(keepFiles, 'ReadFcn', @some_custom_read_fcn);