Reading in xls files from folder- saving data with identifier from filename

Hi, I have a folder full of xls files, named data_00001 through data_10000. Each file has a dozen or so identically named tabs full of RV's. I am interested in reading all files and tabs and creating histograms of the RV's.

Is there a way to read in the last 5 digits of the file names and attached them to each tab name (which I saved as a variable) ? Then each variable is a n*1 cell array, where each cell contains the raw RV data?

I used regexp to extract the number as a string and converted it to a double, and I used a for loop to save variable X {1,k} via importdata. How can I incorporate the saved double into this variable?

Answer 1

[Cedric]

You can build a solution based on the following (not tested).

 D      = dir( 'Z:\MyFiles\FileName\d*.xls' ) ;
 tabs   = {'X', 'Y', 'Z'} ;

 nFiles = length( D ) ;
 nTabs  = length( tabs ) ;
 data   = cell( nFiles, nTabs ) ;

 for fId = 1 : nFiles
     for tId = 1 : nTabs
         idStr = D(fId).name(6:10) ;
         data{fId,tId} = xlsread( D(fId).name, tabs{tId} ) ;
     end
 end

Let me know if your setup is different (in particular for tab names), and I can adapt the answer.

[Mike]

Cedric- thanks for your post. I apologize for the confusion in my question, the tabs are not identically named in the sense of Results 1- n, but rather X,Y,Z... where each file has the same tabs.

I had a question - in D, can I replace '*.xls' with the path of the folder?ie... 'Z:\MyFiles\FileName\d*).xls' ?

Also, the For fID loop is as below? for fId = 1 : nFiles

[Cedric]

Hi Mike, you are right, the nFiles was truncated in one of my edits. See my updated answer and let me know if anything is unclear or doesn't apply to your case.