Using wildcards in dir only for strings

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Cl
Cl on 27 Oct 2014
Answered: Anand Swaroop on 7 Dec 2021
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?

Answers (1)

Anand Swaroop
Anand Swaroop on 7 Dec 2021
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

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