Using wildcards in dir only for strings

I have a set of files named

abc1.mat
yhs2.mat
slk3.mat

etc. I need to loop through them all and find the files with the specified number, so my initial thought was to use

dir('*',number,'*')

but this causes a problem when the numbers reach double figures. So if I search for 1, I will get 1, 10, 11, 12 etc. Is there any way of searching for just the number and removing those that I would not want?

Answer 1

[Anand Swaroop]

To filter out file which has a number supposed to match exactly (not partially).

We can try below code snippet.

% Your search criteria 
filelist = dir(['*' num2str(number,'%d') '*']); 

% Using regex to match exact number 
filename = regexp({filelist.name}, ['[a-zA-Z]+' num2str(number,'%d') '[a-zA-Z.]+'], 'match'); 

% Removing empty cells 
filename(~cellfun('isempty',filename)) 

When we are using dir(),we cannot do much solely using wild characters. So, we must use some alternate solution. Hope this will solve your problem.

Best Regards,

Anand Swaroop