Read certain txt files from a directory in matlab

Question

I have 200 txt files in a directory and I am wondering how can I read and plot some of them. Lets say that the files names are like

1_Mark_slow , 2_Mark_fast , 3_Mark_slow , 4_Mark_fast , etc.

I would like to read all 'slow' files.

Thanks a lot in advance

Answer 1

You can get a listing of the contents of certain directory using dir , and filter them using the asterisk. For example:

myPath='/home/digna/myfiles/';
files=dir( fullfile( myPath, '*slow') );

This will return a struct array with information about all the files which filename contains the word "slow". The fields of the structure are the following:

name
date
bytes
isdir
datenum

So you can read them by accessing the name field:

for i=1:length(files)
  file=files(i).name;
  filepath = fullfile( myPath, file );
  %open and read file using filepath
end

Please see Matlab's fullfile command for cross-platform concatenation of file names.