Jiro's pick this week is GetFullPath by Jan.

Jan is no stranger to good File Exchange entries. I've already highlighted two of his entries before (cryptAES and AutoWarnDlg). This one is a very handy utility for those working with files in different directories and needing an easy way to get absolute path names from relative or partial names. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I didn't see the pain I was having until I came across Jan's entry. In various MATLAB programs, I have used code that looked like this. I'm using fileparts to go up directories and fullfile to construct paths.

curDir   = pwd
mainDir  = fileparts(fileparts(curDir));            % go up 2 directories
imgFile1 = fullfile(mainDir, 'Internal', 'GoogleMap.png')

% Check that the file exists
assert(exist(imgFile1, 'file') == 2, 'File does not exist')

curDir =
C:\MyStuff\Work\NoCopy\Blog\POTW\FullPath
imgFile1 =
C:\MyStuff\Work\NoCopy\Blog\Internal\GoogleMap.png

I can use relative path along with fullfile, but the result looks kind of messy:

imgFile2 = fullfile(curDir, '..', '..', 'Internal', 'GoogleMap.png')

% Check that the file exists
assert(exist(imgFile2, 'file') == 2, 'File does not exist');

imgFile2 =
C:\MyStuff\Work\NoCopy\Blog\POTW\FullPath\..\..\Internal\GoogleMap.png

With Jan's GetFullPath, I get exactly what I want, with a simple, familiar syntax:

imgFile3 = GetFullPath('..\..\Internal\GoogleMap.png')

% Check that the file exists
assert(exist(imgFile3, 'file') == 2, 'File does not exist');

imgFile3 =
C:\MyStuff\Work\NoCopy\Blog\Internal\GoogleMap.png

If you're familiar with some of Jan's entries, he has included a fast C-Mex version of the code (Windows-only), but for people like me who breathe MATLAB, the .m version is enough to evoke a smile. He also includes a unit test suite for his function, which is always a good practice.

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Published with MATLAB® 7.11