MATLAB: Listing folders in directory with specific strings

matching dirnamesmatching strings

I have a directory full of folders. I want to only list (and count) those with a specific naming format that starts with a numerical string and not any other folders in that directory. How can I do this? for example: FolderA contains these subfolders

180705-France, 180705-Germany, refdata

I want to list and count only the folders under folder A that start with a numeric string. In this case, the list should return '180705-France' and '180705-Germany', and a length(dirlist) should return 2.

something like,

pathn =['D:\FolderA'];
list= dir([pathn '\1*']);
len =length(list);

would work, but I need it to work for any folder whose name begins with numbers 0-9.

I tried using regexp but couldn't figure out how to get it to work. If I figure it out, I'll post it here, but I'm sure someone already knows how to do this….thanks.

Best Answer

You can work around it with a dos command:

[status,cmdout] = dos("dir *")
list = regexp(cmdout,'\d{6}-[A-Za-z]+','match');
len =length(list);

or alternatively:

s = dir;
list =regexp({s.name},'\d{6}-[A-Za-z]+','match');
len = length(find(~cellfun(@isempty,list)));

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MATLAB: List all and only files with no extension

Folder   = 'C:\Temp';  % Your folder
FileList = dir(fullfile(Folder, '*'));
NameList = {FileList.name};
% NameList(ismember(NameList, {'.', '..'})) = [];  % Remove . and ..  Not required here
hasDot   = contains(NameList, '.');
NameList(hasDot) = [];   % Removes . and .. also

Now this is the list of all files, which do not contain a dot and there do not have a file extension. If you want to exclude folders also:

NameList(hasDot || [Filelist.isdir]) = [];

If you want to search recursively in subfolders also:

FileList = dir(fullfile(Folder, '**', '*'));
isFile   = [FileList.isdir];
NameList = {FileList(isFile).name};
PathList = {FileList(isFile).folder};
noDot    = ~contains(NameList, '.');
File     = fullfile(PathList(noDot), NameList(noDot));

MATLAB: Hello i want to search for ( * .inf ) files in a folder

Here's a function that searches for files with a given extension. It searches through a chosen parent directory and all of its subfolder at all levels. At the end of the for-loop, you can choose wether the output (matchList) should list just the filenames or the entire path to the files. I recommend using the entire path in case you have duplicate file names.

% Name the parent directory and file extension 
parentDir = 'C:\Users\foobar\Documents\MATLAB'; 
ext = 'inf'; %without the dot
% list all folders and subfolders
folderList = strsplit(genpath(parentDir), ';')'; 
% initialize loop vars
exp = sprintf('.+\\.%s', ext); 
matchList = {}; 
% loop through each folder and search for files
for i = 1:length(folderList)
    folderData = dir(folderList{i}); 
    names = {folderData.name}; 
    strLen = cellfun(@length, names); 
    endIdxCell = regexp(names, exp, 'end'); 
    endIdx = zeros(size(endIdxCell)); 
    endIdx(~cellfun(@isempty, endIdxCell)) = [endIdxCell{:}]; 
   % matchList = [matchList; names(endIdx == strLen & endIdx > 0)'];                         % list filenames only
    matchList = [matchList; fullfile(folderList{i}, names(endIdx == strLen & endIdx > 0))']; %list full paths
end

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: List all and only files with no extension

MATLAB: Hello i want to search for ( * .inf ) files in a folder

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