How do I import multiple files from a folder in MATLAB?

I want to open all the files with a certain attribute (e.g. they all have 'History' in their name) and open them, one by one, in MATLAB. I know of the command dir my_name.txt which will list it like I want, but how do I now open the files that it listed?

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

how do you want to open those files?

[Samyukta Ramnath]

I need to open them as in fopen The code that I tried was

   if true
    % code
    matfiles = dir(fullfile('E:\MachineLearning\TestFiles\*.txt'));
    data  = cell(4,100);
    for i = 3 : 7
       fid = fopen(matfiles(i).name);
       data{i} = fscanf(fid,'%c');
    end
  end

This worked but I need to know how to open only the files with a certain something in their name. For example open all files with '.txt' in the name. That is, open all text files only.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Remember to fclose(fid) after you do the fscanf()

The code you show will already only locate file names ending in .txt .

You should be more careful with directories, though:

testfiledir = 'E:\MachineLearning\TestFiles\';
matfiles = dir(fullfile(testfiledir, '*.txt'));
nfiles = length(matfiles);
data  = cell(nfiles);
for i = 1 : nfiles
   fid = fopen( fullfile(testfiledir, matfiles(i).name) );
   data{i} = fscanf(fid,'%c');
   fclose(fid);
end

[Samyukta Ramnath]

Ah yes, I could make the computer lose a lot of memory without fclosing! Thank you!

[Walter Roberson]

It would probably run out of file descriptors before it ran out of memory.