How do I open a file without the dialog box opening?

I have a code that previouly used uigetfille to open a filelist. This prompts a dialog box with filelist.txt inserted in the search so you only have to click open. How do i get the file to open automatically without the dialog box or pressing open? When i say 'open automatically' I just want the filelist to be opened without the prompt from the dialog box. Which I would assume to use fopen but does not work. I have tried fopen, winopen, fileread, uiopen, load and open. None have worked and most give the error of too many output arguments.

The objective is for the filelist to be opened so the data can be processed after being filtered which I already have code for processing and filtering.

This project is an app where you select test files that you have then they are put into a table where you can include the files you want then from there the filelist is created and it gets run against a filter based on our certification window. The number of test files vary with each test and it is unknown how many will be run total. The filter varies as well based on location. For this test specifically a 12x3 table is generated. The 12 is consistent for every test and the 3 relates to the number of files which will vary.

Where the line of code is, the table has been generated, the filelist has been created and now the filelist needs to be opened so that it can be run against the filter gui.

this currently works, I want to make the code more efficient.

[FileNames,PathName, Method] = uigetfile('filelist.txt');

[Stephen23]

"How do i get the file to open automatically without the dialog box or pressing open?"

Do not call UIGETFILE.

[Nicole]

What do i use instead? I have tried many things and nothing has worked. This code was given to me and i would like to make it more effiicient.

[Dyuman Joshi]

What is the objective? Is it to read files from a folder and use the data to perform calculations/operations?

What does "open automatically" mean in this context?

As a general suggestion, see -

https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/process-a-sequence-of-files.html

readtable

readmatrix

[Nicole]

The objective is for the filelist to be opened so the data can be processed after being filtered which I already have code for processing and filtering.

This project is an app where you select test files that you have then they are put into a table where you can include the files you want then from there the filelist is created and it gets run against a filter based on our certification window. The number of test files vary with each test and it is unknown how many will be run total. The filter varies as well based on location.

When i say 'open automatically' I just want the filelist to be opened without the prompt from the dialog box. Which I would assume to use fopen but does not work.

Where the line of code is the table has been generated, the filelist has been created and it now needs to be opened so that it can be run against the filter gui.

Answer 1

[Hassaan]

if you want to open a file automatically without user interaction and you know the file's name and path, you can directly use the fopen function in MATLAB. fopen is used to open files for reading, writing, or both.

Approach 1

After opening the file with fopen, you can then use functions like fread, fscanf, textscan, or fgetl to read the contents of the file depending on the file format.

% Define the full path to the file
fullFilePath = fullfile('C:\path\to\your\file', 'filelist.txt');

% Open the file for reading
fileID = fopen(fullFilePath, 'r');

% Check if the file was successfully opened
if fileID == -1
    error('File could not be opened.');
end

% Read the contents of the file (assuming it is text)
contents = fread(fileID, '*char')';

% Always close the file when done
fclose(fileID);

% Use the contents as needed
disp(contents);

Replace 'C:\path\to\your\file' with the actual path to the directory containing your filelist.txt.

Approach 2

If filelist.txt contains a list of filenames and you want to process each one, you might use textscan to read each line into a cell array:

% Open the file for reading
fileID = fopen(fullFilePath, 'r');

% Check if the file was successfully opened
if fileID == -1
    error('File could not be opened.');
end

% Read lines into a cell array
fileList = textscan(fileID, '%s');

% Close the file
fclose(fileID);

% fileList{1} will contain the list of filenames
for i = 1:length(fileList{1})
    disp(['Processing file: ' fileList{1}{i}]);
    % Add your processing code here
end

In this code, %s tells textscan to read each line as a string, and each filename will be stored in fileList{1} as a cell array. You can then process each filename as needed.

If you want to load data from a .mat file, then you would use the load function, which does not require opening the file with fopen:

% Load the .mat file directly
data = load(fullFilePath);

% Use the loaded data as needed
disp(data);

Please make sure that the path and file exist, and you have the necessary permissions to access them. If you continue to see errors, ensure that no other function or variable in your workspace has the same name as these functions, which could cause conflicts.

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