How to select files that contain a particular string as part of their name?

Hello,

I am new to MATLAB and coding in general. I figured out how to loop through files in a directory but I want to be able to edit them based on whether they contain one string or another as part of their file name (red, green, or blue). I have listed what I have so far below. The file names are long and generally look something like this "16011201-04_10x_section-8_EGFP-CY3-Image Export-02_c1+2.tif (Red Results).xls" Any help would be appreciated.

SpreadSheetInput = uigetdir('','Select folder containing ImageJ macro data');
disp('You have selected')
disp(SpreadSheetInput)
files = dir(fullfile(SpreadSheetInput, '*.xls'));
files = rmfield(files, 'date');
files = rmfield(files, 'bytes');
files = rmfield(files, 'datenum');
files = rmfield(files, 'isdir');
for i = 1:length(files)
    disp(files(i))
    if
        %Not sure what to put here.
    end
end

Answer 1

[KSSV]

You can use strcmp to compare to strings and strfind to find whether the user input string exists in the given string.

Ex;

filename = 'Red Results.xls'
if strfind(filename, 'Red')
   % do waht you want 
end

In the above ex. the filename has string Red...so it will go inside loop...be careful in specifying the word you want to find/ match.

Answer 2

[Stephen23]

The answer really depends on what you want to do: how do you plan on working with those filenames? Something like this might work for you:

D = uigetdir(pwd,'Select Directory');
S = dir(fullfile(D,'*.xls'));
%
for k = 1:numel(S)
    N = S(k).name;
    disp(N)
    R = regexp(N,'(Red|Green|Blue)','match','once');
    switch R
        case 'Red'
            disp Red
        case 'Green'
            disp Green
        case 'Blue'
            disp Blue
    end
end

tested on these files:

[T Lavin]

I am getting an error that says "Struct contents reference from a non-struct array object." for N = SpreadSheetInput(k).name;. I want to eventually combine data from all these .xls files that have the same name but are the results for different channels into one .xls file with each channel's result on a different sheet.

[Stephen23]

@T Lavin: the error message clearly shows that the code you are running has nothing to do with the code that I gave in my answer.

I wrote code to read the filenames, and distinguishes them depending on the presence of Red/Green/Blue in the filename. It works without error: I tested it.