How do I read a file name into a function?

I have a folder full of .stl files containing sets of (x,y,z) co-ordinates of points in 3d. I have found a function, stlread, which reads these files, all I have to do is call the path of the file in ' ' quotation marks.

How do I choose this file from a directory and put it into stlread? If I use the MATLAB function filename=uigetfile, I can choose the file but if I use stlread(filename) it doesn't work even though filename is a string.

Eventually I wish to possibly have a list of paths to .stl files in a .txt file and then extract each one in turn to run stlread on all of them. Is this possible somehow?

[Sara]

Look into dir(directory_name). This will give you the list of all the files in a specific directory. You can then run your code on all the stl files with a loop.

Answer 1

[Dasharath Gulvady]

In order to read all the files with file names matching a specific pattern, you can use "fullfile" function. The below sample code will read all the file names that end with ".stl" in a given directory :

 filePattern = fullfile('./', '*.m');
files = dir(filePattern);

Here is the documentation page for dir .

Note that './' refers to the current directory and it can be changed to any other directory.

Note that "uigetfile" will let you select a file without navigating to the folder in which the file is present.

Now you can loop through "files" to get the filenames using the "name" field of the structure "files". A demo code is as follows:

 for i=1:length(files)
    filename = files(i);
    filename.name
    %stlread(filename); %you can try this out by uncommenting
end

Also, to read file names from a text file, you can use textread .

Also take a look at few other such functions here which may come be helpful.

Answer 2

[Andrii Mazur]

Thank you!