Understanding basics of struct?

Hello,

A beginners short story with 3 and a half Questions:

• I want to get a list of all filepath of filenames in a folder (?).

For that I'm using dir which creates a struct (so far so good).

• Now I want to save the first colum with the filenames as a cell array (?)

Solved this by using struct2cell .

• But is there a way to export a single colum (or even a defined range of that colum) ?

I was also thinking an easy for loop would solve that but...

• I'm struggeling to get the length of the struct ?

And...

• Is there an elegant way to sort names in the struct in a "natural way" (1,2,3,...,11,12 instead of 1,11,12,2,3,...) ?

Big Thanks!!!

Answer 1

[Ameer Hamza]

To create a cell array with a single field (column)

d = dir;
folderPaths = {d.folder};
folderPaths_range = {d(5:11).folder}; % for files 5 to 11

Length of struct

n = numel(d);

To sort in "natural way", see this FEX submission by Stephen: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/47434-natural-order-filename-sort

[Carlone]

thanks, It solved all issues!

[Stephen23]

How the syntax {d.name} works:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/discussions/tips/847976-tutorial-comma-separated-lists-and-how-to-use-them

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-multiple-elements-of-a-nonscalar-struct-array.html