I dont understand this code with dir and sprintf

Hey

I want to convert mat-files and my supervisor gave me this matlab-code to do it with. I am not sure I understand it fully, can you help?

[Stephen23]

What is the point of this line?:

sprintf([''], ii, segment)

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

1) Do not use "path" as a variable name, as doing that interferes with using the MATLAB path.

2) Instead of

files = dir(sprintf('%s/%s/*.mat', path, hemi(ee))

use

files = dir( fullfile(path, hemi(ee), '*.mat') )

and later when the file name is being constructed, use fullfile() then as well.

3)

sprintf([''], ii, segment)

is going to result in the empty vector because of the empty format '' . The purpose of that code is confusing.

4) it really looks to me as if the code for filesB and B is wrong. Different directories are being referred to in the different lines.

[Zahra S. Abd Al-Hassan]

What does ‰s means? And what does segment='name' represent? is it and cell array or a mat.file a should save before matlab can understand it?

[Walter Roberson]

%s means that a string should be read from the next available parameter and transfered to the output as characters.

segment = 'name'

means that at some point in the development of the program, there was a directory that was named either literally 'name' or else name with a numeric prefix, such as '1name', '2name' and so on. But with the [''] format of the sprintf() the content of the segment variable is being ignored.