Check the existence of a directory based on part of a string?

hello all,

I have a range of sub-folders which are named as CL_CS, CL_CS_01, CL_CS_02...CL_CS_xx. These folders are located in same directory with other folders. I want to run a loop which checks the first 5 characters of the folder name and run some operations inside those folders.

I am not quite sure how to match the string for a folder name. So far...

fpath = 'CL_CS';
     while isequal(exist(fpath,'dir'),7)
  % do something here 
end

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

The simplest option is to use dir directly to return only directory names that match that pattern.

You might also want to sort those directory names using my FEX submission natsortfiles.

S = dir('CL_CS*');
S = S([S.isdir]);
S = natsortfiles(S); % (optional) alphanumeric sort by filename

and then simply loop over those subdirectory names:

for k = 1:numel(S)
    name = S(k).name
    ... your code
end

[automycer]

This works great. Thanks! I had an issue with concatenating the directory path for my CL_CS folder in the dir function (since everything is defined in nested structures), but the asterisk(*) is a life saver.

Also, I will be needing natsortfiles later on. Thanks for that too!

[Stephen23]

Use fullfile to join the path string to the name pattern string:

S = dir(fullfile(pathStr,'CL_CS*'));

and then also inside the loop:

name = fullfile(pathStr,S(k).name)

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

When you run

f=dir(current_folder)

You wil get a cell array of the content of your current folder, like

f={'CL_CS','CL_CS_01','CL_CS_02','other1' 'other'}
name=regexp(f,'CL_CS.+','match','once')
idx=~cellfun(@isempty,name)
name=name(idx)

[automycer]

Thank you for the answer. This works fine when the directory is 'string'.

Although in my case, it is,

    f = dir(para.Global.mainpath)

f =

8x1 struct array with fields:

    name
    date
    bytes
    isdir
    datenum

How do I convert the folder names in the nested structure to char vectors?

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

f={f.name}

[Stephen23]

@automycer: see my answer, I already showed you how to do this correctly (Azzi Abdelmalek's answer is not correct, because as you have found dir returns a structure, not a cell array of names).

And I also showed you how to get the names into the correct order!

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

@Stephen Cobeldick, why the answer is not correct? dir returns a struct variable, but you can get the cell array containing the names, as mentioned in my above comment!