How to list files with multiple extensions?

Suppose I want mp3 or avi files from a folder, on Unix I could do

ls *.{mp3|avi}

Is there a clean one-liner way to do this in matlab? Presently, I can do it in two lines by doing the following:

f = dir(folder)
f(~cellfun(@isempty,regexpi({f.name},'.*(mp3|avi)'))).name

However, I find this rather ugly compared to the simplicity of the first expression.

Thanks, Kevin

[Matt J]

If you find it ugly, why not just wrap it in an mfile of your own?

Answer 1

[Doug Hull]

Can you run the command twice with two filters? The results would be two structures of the same format that could then be appended together.

[Kevin]

Specifically, do you mean something like this?

f = [dir(fullfile(folder,'*mp3')); dir(fullfile(folder,'*avi'))];

I considered this, and it can certainly do for my present situation. However, it doesn't scale as well to more than a couple of extensions (at least the way I presented it) as the cellfun thing I put previously.

Thanks for the suggestion, though!

[Sean de Wolski]

@Kevin, a for-loop over a cell array containing the extentions would allow it to scale, though concatenating structures is ugly.

Answer 2

[Sean de Wolski]

You could just farm that command out to Unix if you are on a unix system...

[Kevin]

You mean, something like:

[~, sysout] = system(['ls ' fullfile(folder,'*{mp3,avi}')]);
fileNames = regexp(sysout,'\n','split');

While this would work, cross comparability with windows is a must for me. Thanks for your input, though!

Answer 3

[ANKUR WADHWA]

Though the thread is very old still for users who are looking for an easy way a very simple existing solution on Matlbcentral

https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/16173-dir-search-multiple-files