How to automate reading multiple HDF files and saving the information from it?

Hello!

I currently have a folder with 15.000 HDF files all named YYYYMMDD.HDF from data since 1997. So the first file is 19970101.HDF and the last one is 20203131.HDF

Each of these files has a matrix I need to save the values of (precipitation values)

With

hdfread("19970101.HDF","precipitation");

I can exctract the matrix for one of these files, which gets saved as ans.mat in my workplace.

Ideally I need a way to read all these HDF files and have them saved with their original name but in .mat, so 19970101.mat

I've tried plenty of things for the last 3 days but I can't come up with how to automate this process. I appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

[Vatsal]

Hi,

Automating the reading of HDF files and saving the extracted information as .mat files with their original names can be achieved by writing a MATLAB script.

Below is an example illustrating how to implement this process:

% Define the folder where your HDF files are located
folderPath = 'path_to_your_folder'; % Replace with your folder path

% Get a list of all HDF files in the folder
hdfFiles = dir(fullfile(folderPath, '*.HDF'));

% Loop through each HDF file
for k = 1:length(hdfFiles)
    % Construct the full file path
    hdfFilePath = fullfile(folderPath, hdfFiles(k).name);
    
    % Read the precipitation matrix from the HDF file
    precipitation = hdfread(hdfFilePath, 'precipitation');
    
    % Construct the new file name by replacing the HDF extension with MAT
    matFileName = strrep(hdfFiles(k).name, '.HDF', '.mat');
    
    % Construct the full path for the new .mat file
    matFilePath = fullfile(folderPath, matFileName);
    
    % Save the precipitation matrix to a .mat file
    save(matFilePath, 'precipitation');
end

% Display a message when the process is complete
disp('All files have been processed and saved as .mat files.');

I hope this helps!