How can I import and then plot 16 files with .out extension using one for loop?

Dear Friends,

My purpose is to import 16 different and sepearate files with .out extension and then plotting these files. The file names go like comb1.out, comb2.out, ....., comb16.out

In real life, I can have more than 16 files, let's say a thousand files.

A basic code is here;

A=1:16;
B=string(A);
for i=1:length(A)
    C(i)=append("comb",B(i),".out");
end
C(1)="comb1.out", C(2)="comb2.out",...

But, here I have string values assigned to C; "comb1.out", "comb2.out" ... Converting them into Char does not work. After importing these files, I will try to plot them by using again for loops. I am very confused with the string&char&double conversion.

Anyway, the extension can be .xlsx or other types. The number of files can be more than 1000. Would you please tell me a general code to import any type of extension and then plot using for loops?

Thanks

[Stephen23]

The general solution is shown in the MATLAB documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/process-a-sequence-of-files.html

[Burak Duran]

Thank you

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

"Would you please tell me a general code to import any type of extension"

There isn't. How you import a file completely depends on the actual format of the file, which may or may not be guessed from the extension. While typically .xlsx files are excel files which can be imported easily in matlab with readtable and co., the .out extension is not generally associated with a particular format. Different programs may use the .out extension for their files and they may all have different formats. If you're lucky, the file may be text which you may be able to import with readtable or some other text parsing function, but if the file is binary, you'd have to write your own decoder.

[Burak Duran]

Thanks, for this code, I only need to write a code providing importing 16 files and the plotting. You know writing continuously load comb1.out, load comb2.out is not the practical way especially considering a great number of output files.

You are right if the xlsx is the issue I can use another type of importing command.

To solve this question, I need to generate a general flow. I do not want to write comb1.out and the plot(comb1.out(:,2),comb1.out(:,1)) 16 times.

[Stephen23]

"I do not want to write comb1.out and the plot(comb1.out(:,2),comb1.out(:,1)) 16 times."

Of course not, that is exactly what loops and arrays are for. There are two basic approaches, either:

1. generate the filenames (e.g. from numeric using sprintf), or
2. obtain the flenames from the OS using dir.

The MATLAB documentation already has examples for both of these:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/process-a-sequence-of-files.html

[Burak Duran]

Thanks for your help.