Code to edit a file name?

Hello all,

I'm writing a program that calibrates various files. Part of the job I want it to do is to output a new file with the calibrated data. In doing so though I want to edit the original name for the name of the output file.

Matlab seems to have a rather robust string handling system, a bit more perhaps than I'm ready to deal with at the moment. I've found that I can use the "strcat" function to jam two strings together. This will likely lead to a filename.filextensionextratxt.fileextension. But at the moment its the best I can figure out.

Anyone handy out there know of a way to perhaps remove a set number of characters at the end of a string or perhaps a more elegant method?

Thanks for your time!

[Fangjun Jiang]

You need to provide an example of your file names and the expected pattern or new file names.

[B_Richardson]

strtok does just that

Answer 1

[Ping]

you can call [pathstr, name, ext] = fileparts(filename) to seperate filename and extension.

[Karl]

Thanks for giving this suggestion Ping, I ended up having to go back and modify a different section of my code in the same program and found this particular fxn to be much easier to use. :)

Answer 2

[Sean de Wolski]

string = 'hello world'
sm3 = string(1:end-3);  %string removing three letters.

Answer 3

[Karl]

Hey folks, thanks so much for your helpfulness. I really did not expect so many responses so fast! Its wonderful!

For those with similar desires here is the fallout:

I originally wanted to use the fileparts command as it seemed to be a very handy way to do things (also clued me in that I could open files from the non-current folder). I had trouble though:

 \Testing\Cyclohexane.csv became "\Testing" "Cyclohexane" ".csv"

When I went back and tried to writeout a file in a test using:

 strcat(pathstr, name, 'added.txt');

I got:

 ...\Current Folder\\TestingCyclohexaneadded.txt

Obviously matlab wasn't to happy about this crazy file name with the double backslashes. I was able to fix the missing slash by just shoving an extra in the concatenation.

Ultimately I decided to just stick with the file name and use Sean de's solution to just clip off the extension and then concatenate onto the file.

 filename = filename(1:end-4);
 filename = strcat(filename,' extra.txt');

Which works quite nicely.

Thanks again for all the help and your time folks! Karl