MATLAB: Sorting the name field in dir command

commanddirfieldfilesfoldernamenatsortfilessortstruct

Hi all,

I have a problem when I'm trying to get the content of a folder. It gets the name of the files but not in order. For example, the files starts with X- where the X is a number from 1 to 320. My code gets the name's file in the order 1, 10, 100, etc… and I need it in order 1,2,3,4…320

This is my code

myFolder = 'C:\Users\U95511\Dropbox\UPF\Roberto Verino\Advantrack\Test15-130313\P12\A3\Results';
if ~isdir(myFolder)
  errorMessage = sprintf('Error: The following folder does not exist:\n%s', myFolder);
  uiwait(warndlg(errorMessage));
  return;
end
filePattern = fullfile(myFolder, '*.xls');
xlsFiles = dir(filePattern);

I need to order the struct xlsFiles.

I tried with W=sort(xlsFiles.name) but it creates an array instead of another struct ordered.

Thanks for the help.

BR,

Raúl.

Best Answer

f= dir(filePattern); 
xlsfiles={f.name}
xlsfiles=sort(xlsfiles)

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Avoid reading files in alphabetical order Matlab dir

See this..

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/10959

MATLAB: Issues with sort_nat and natsortfiles; error improper matrix reference

natsortfiles returns a cell array, not a structure. Just like sort it returns the same cell array that was provided to it, just sorted into a particular order. Do you expect sort to return a structure when you pass it a cell array? As I wrote in the help quite clearly, natsortfiles has output " Y = Cell of Strings, X with all strings sorted into natural-order."

Not only did I state that the output is a cell array I also gave several examples in the FEX description, in the M-file help, and also in the HTML documentation, such as this simple example:

D = 'natsortfiles_test'; % directory path
S = dir(fullfile(D,'*.txt')); % get list of files in directory
N = natsortfiles({S.name}); % sort file names into order
for k = 1:numel(N)
  fullfile(D,N{k})
end

Notice that in all of those examples the output is a cell array (just like the input is). But you are trying to access the output as if it was a structure with fields:

cx(q).name

...but a cell array does not have fields! So once you stop trying to access the cell array as if it was a structure, and start to access the cell array using cell array indexing (just like the examples I wrote show) then that error will disappear.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Avoid reading files in alphabetical order Matlab dir

MATLAB: Issues with sort_nat and natsortfiles; error improper matrix reference

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