Reading a directory location from text file and move to that directory.

Hi all, I am new in matlab can you please help me with the following?:

I have a text file named config.txt with the following entries:

#--------------------------------Directories---------------------------

directory1 /media/fpdata/data1/ #data1

directory2 /media/fpdata/data2/ #data2

#----------------------------------------------------------------------

I would like to get the path for directory1 and change the directory inside my code to that directory.

I was trying the following with "grep":

config_file = 'config.txt'; %file with information

[fl, p] = grep('-u','directory1',config_file);

disp(p.result)

I got the following:

config.txt: directory1 /media/fpdata/data1/ #data1

from here I would like just to have the path: /media/fpdata/data1/ and then change to that directory

Maybe "grep" is not the right way to do that?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

[Matthew Eicholtz]

I would suggest trying to use textscan. The specifics of the input to the function will depend strongly on the setup of your text file. But, from what I can tell you have 3 columns (for instance, 'directory1' is in the first column, '/media/fpdata/data1/' is in the second column, '#data1' is in the third column).

In this case, try the following code:

fid = fopen('config.txt'); %this will open the file for read access
C = textscan(fid,'%s %s %s'); %scans the file, using '%s %s %s' as the FormatSpec
mask = strcmp(C{1},'directory1'); %finds matches in the first column for the string you want to find (in this case, 'directory1')
d = C{2}{mask}; %extracts the corresponding second column

Once you run the code above, you can change to the desired directory using:

cd(d);

[Francisco]

Thanks a lot! Matt for the details and explanations. They solved my problem.