wildcard when setting directories

I want to set a directory path to use later in my code. However, each subject has a different folder name in their folder hierarchy: e.g., the full path to one person's folder hierarchy = 'C:\Users\APK-User\Documents\baseline\pp\3001\s001\2010\S001\con001.nii'

but the full path to another person's = 'C:\Users\APK-User\Documents\baseline\pp\3002\s002\2012\S002\con001.nii'

What could I do to have MatLab skip over the s002\2012\S002 portion of each person's path? Is there wildcard syntax I could use here? I couldn't get any combination I tried to work:

As an example, I want to be able to enter any subject in a subjID object array:

    subjID={'3001'}

and then create their data path:

 data_path = ['C:\Users\APK-User\Documents\baseline\pp\',subjID,'\','/s*','\','/2*','\','\S*'];

(& then I'm using SPM to select their .nii file:

a = spm_select('ExtFPList', fullfile(data_path),'^.*\.nii$');

The above syntax for data path doesn't work/doesn't skip over the file names properly. How could I get MatLab to do this?

[per isakson]

subjID is a cell array, but need to be a character row.

Answer 1

[Arvind Narayanan]

Hi Kathleen,

The variable subjID above is a cell array. If you would like to loop over its elements and use SPM to select the files, you can place your code inside a for loop with iterator i and refer to each element of subjID as

subjID{i}

If you would like to return a comma-separated list of the elements of subjID, use this notation

subjID{:}

Please refer to the documentation on working with cell arrays for more information: https://in.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2016b/matlab/matlab_prog/access-data-in-a-cell-array.html

Thanks,

Arvind