Removing characters from/breaking up file names

Hello all,

I have a list of file names from which I'd like to remove some characters. Ideally, I'd like to break up the file name into parts, but can't figure out how to do that (aside from fileparts, which was useful in removing the extension). Here's an example:

 02-Feb-2009_1.xls  ------------------------------------- 02-Feb-2009_1

 02-Feb-2009_2.xls  ----after file parts ext removal----> 02-Feb-2009_2

 02-Feb-2009_3.xls  ------------------------------------- 02-Feb-2009_3

I would like to separate the names into dates and trial numbers (in different columns):

02-Feb-2009_1   -------------------------------------- 02-Feb-2009 / / 1

02-Feb-2009_2   --------------?--?--?----------------> 02-Feb-2009 / / 2

02-Feb-2009_3   --------------------------------------   02-Feb-2009 / / 3

I have tried taking the length of the names, then subtracting 2 or 3, but I can't figure out how to apply that new length to each cell in the file.

Answer 1

[Mischa Kim]

B.M. you could use the strfind command:

 str = '02-Feb-2009_1.xls';
 str_trim = str(1:strfind(str,'.')-1)
 str_trim =
 02-Feb-2009_1

or, for the latter part

 str = '02-Feb-2009_1';
 str_1 = str(1:strfind(str,'_')-1)
 str_1 =
 02-Feb-2009
 str_2 = str(strfind(str,'_')+1:end)
 str_2 =
 1

[B.M.]

Wonderful, thanks Mischa!

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

What about using the fileparts() function?

[B.M.]

I did, to remove the .xls extension--that was easy. It was harder to clip off extra parts of the filenames (like, in my case, the underscore plus trial number). In other words, I wasn't sure how to remove a custom part of a file name rather than the pre-specified outputs in "fileparts."

[Image Analyst]

Sorry - I didn't read closely enough. I guess you need to do custom parsing like Mischa showed. I often do that too.