How to get all files under a specific directory in MATLAB?

Question

I need to get all those files under D:\dic and loop over them to further process individually.

Does MATLAB support this kind of operations?

It can be done in other scripts like PHP,Python...

Answer 1

You're looking for dir to return the directory contents.

To loop over the results, you can simply do the follow (it's been a while since I last used Matlab, so it may not be 100% accurate):

dirlist = dir('.');
for i = 1:length(dirlist)
    dirlist(i)

This should give you output in the following format, e.g.:

name: 'my_file'
date: '01-Jan-2010 12:00:00'
bytes: 56
isdir: 0
datenum: []

Answer 2

You can use regexp or strcmp to eliminate . and .. Or you could use the isdir field if you only want files in the directory, not folders.

list=dir(pwd);  %get info of files/folders in current directory
isfile=~[list.isdir]; %determine index of files vs folders
filenames={list(isfile).name}; %create cell array of file names

or combine the last two lines:

filenames={list(~[list.isdir]).name};

For a list of folders in the directory excluding . and ..

dirnames={list([list.isdir]).name};
dirnames=dirnames(~(strcmp('.',dirnames)|strcmp('..',dirnames)));

From this point, you should be able to throw the code in a nested for loop, and continue searching each subfolder until your dirnames returns an empty cell for each subdirectory.

Answer 3

I don't know a single-function method for this, but you can use genpath to recurse a list of subdirectories only. This list is returned as a semicolon-delimited string of directories, so you'll have to separate it using strread, i.e.

dirlist = strread(genpath('/path/of/directory'),'%s','delimiter',';')

If you don't want to include the given directory, remove the first entry of dirlist, i.e. dirlist(1)=[]; since it is always the first entry.

Then get the list of files in each directory with a looped dir.

filenamelist=[];
for d=1:length(dirlist)
    % keep only filenames
    filelist=dir(dirlist{d});
    filelist={filelist.name};

    % remove '.' and '..' entries
    filelist([strmatch('.',filelist,'exact');strmatch('..',filelist,'exact'))=[];
    % or to ignore all hidden files, use filelist(strmatch('.',filelist))=[];

    % prepend directory name to each filename entry, separated by filesep*
    for f=1:length(filelist)
        filelist{f}=[dirlist{d} filesep filelist{f}];
    end

    filenamelist=[filenamelist filelist];
end

filesep returns the directory separator for the platform on which MATLAB is running.

This gives you a list of filenames with full paths in the cell array filenamelist. Not the neatest solution, I know.

Answer 4

Here's a function that searches recursively through all subdirectories of a given directory, collecting a list of all file names it finds:

function fileList = getAllFiles(dirName)

  dirData = dir(dirName);      %# Get the data for the current directory
  dirIndex = [dirData.isdir];  %# Find the index for directories
  fileList = {dirData(~dirIndex).name}';  %'# Get a list of the files
  if ~isempty(fileList)
    fileList = cellfun(@(x) fullfile(dirName,x),...  %# Prepend path to files
                       fileList,'UniformOutput',false);
  end
  subDirs = {dirData(dirIndex).name};  %# Get a list of the subdirectories
  validIndex = ~ismember(subDirs,{'.','..'});  %# Find index of subdirectories
                                               %#   that are not '.' or '..'
  for iDir = find(validIndex)                  %# Loop over valid subdirectories
    nextDir = fullfile(dirName,subDirs{iDir});    %# Get the subdirectory path
    fileList = [fileList; getAllFiles(nextDir)];  %# Recursively call getAllFiles
  end

end

After saving the above function somewhere on your MATLAB path, you can call it in the following way:

fileList = getAllFiles('D:\dic');