How to check if one file selected when using MultiSelection in matlab?

I have a function that allow user to browse and choose some images like this

    [filename, pathname, filterindex] = uigetfile( ...
    {  '*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.png','Images (*.jpg, *.jpeg, *.png)'; ...
       '*.*',  'All Files (*.*)'}, ...
       'Choose Class 1 DataSet', ...
       'MultiSelect', 'on');

And I take the browsed images in a cell array

    ChosenImages = strcat(pathname,filename);

Now I have a problem, if the user entered one image only, it doesn't return this image as one cell, it return each character as cell, and when I use

    length(ChosenImages);

it returns the number of chars in the link!

also I tried

    ischar(ChosenImages{1})

to check if one cell is a cell or not but it gives me an error too.

What can I do to check if the user chosen one image or multiple images?

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

<rant> This is a thing I hate about the way mathworks design their language. All these special cases where a function behaves differently (when n = 1 or when n is vector, or...). It hurts genericity and force you to write 'ifs' all over the place when you're expecting to cope with both the general case and the exception. And it's doubly frustrating as they must have the same if pattern in the function you call to generate that exceptional case in the first place <end rant>

To fix the problem, simply convert the exceptional case back to the generic case with:

   [filename, pathname, filterindex] = uigetfile( ...
    {  '*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.png','Images (*.jpg, *.jpeg, *.png)'; ...
       '*.*',  'All Files (*.*)'}, ...
       'Choose Class 1 DataSet', ...
       'MultiSelect', 'on');
  if ~iscell(filename)
    filename = {filename};
  end %now filename is a cell array regardless of the number of selected files.

[Eslam Hamed]

Thank you a lot it works :)

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

[filename, pathname, filterindex] = uigetfile( ...
  {  '*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.png','Images (*.jpg, *.jpeg, *.png)'; ...
     '*.*',  'All Files (*.*)'}, ...
     'Choose Class 1 DataSet', ...
     'MultiSelect', 'on');
 filename = cellstr(filename);
 %now filename is a cell array regardless of the number of selected files.

[Eslam Hamed]

Your Answer is brilliant, thank you a lot it works ^_^

[Ahmed Harun-Al-Rashid]

Dear Roberson, I also get help to solve similar problem using your answer. Thank you so much.

Sincerely, Rashid

Answer 3

[zhou]

filename = cellstr(filename); % convert char to cellstr

disp(length(filename))