Machine-Independent Filenames

Contents

Recent Example at The MathWorks

Recently at The MathWorks, someone wanted to share some files with another person so they could discuss the content. To do so, the author provided code that looked like this. Here YEAR is a variable of class char.

   load(['T:\1-36U6NN\secprd',YEAR,'.txt'])

You might wonder what the problem with this is. Well, for one thing, the author works on a Windows platform, but the recipient frequently does not. So how could this code have been written differently?

The T:\ drive maps to a file server that is accessible from any of our networked computers. So one possibility is to write code something like this:

      baseLocationWin = 'T:\';
      baseLocationOther = '//home/tester';
      if ispc  % true for windows platforms
          baseLocation = baseLocationWin;
      else
          baseLocation = baseLocationOther;
      end
      path1 = '1-36U6NN';
      YEAR = '2001';
      fname = ['secprd' YEAR '.txt'];
      fullfname = fullfile(baseLocation, path1, fname);

On Windows, where I ran this code, here's the file name.

disp(fullfname)

T:\1-36U6NN\secprd2001.txt

The equivalent UNIX pathname would be

disp([baseLocationOther '/' path1, '/' fname])

//home/tester/1-36U6NN/secprd2001.txt

Reference Material

Here you'll see a list of some MATLAB functions that are useful in writing machine independent applications when it comes to referring to files.

Comments

Have you been in this situation? Do you have other techniques to help users write robust code for handling files? If so, please post here.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® 7.4