Dir Tab

Posted by Sean de Wolski, April 27, 2018

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Sean‘s pick this week is dirtab(in) by Julian.

Do you ever need to scrape the files in a directory and figure out how to parse them? If you have, you’ve probably come across the dir command. While dir works, it’s frustrating because you get back an array of structs, that, in releases since R2013b, would be better served by a table. I’ve found that I now pretty much just always call struct2table on the output. See Loren’s Blog Post on this topic.

This is what Julian’s file does, but he goes one step further and converts the date to a datetime rather than date number and removes those pesky “.” and “..”s from every listed directory. Another bit of extra work saved.

dirtab(pwd)

ans =
  4×7 table
                  folder                        name           ext              date            bytes    isdir     datenum  
    __________________________________    ________________    ______    ____________________    _____    _____    __________
    'C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\'    'dirtab'            '.m'      23-Apr-2018 15:35:22    3776     false    7.3717e+05
    'C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\'    'license'           '.txt'    23-Apr-2018 15:57:12    1306     false    7.3717e+05
    'C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\'    'mainDirTab'        '.m'      23-Apr-2018 17:32:53    2154     false    7.3717e+05
    'C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\'    'wordpress_html'    ''        23-Apr-2018 17:33:13       0     true     7.3717e+05

However, since 18a came out, fullfile now works with strings (my favorite 18a feature!); I’ve typically gone a step further and converted the file parts to strings and added the full file path for easy opening.

D = dirtab(pwd);
SD = varfun(@convertCharsToStrings, D);
SD.Properties.VariableNames = D.Properties.VariableNames;
SD.fullfilepath = fullfile(SD.folder, SD.name + SD.ext);
SD.datenum = []

SD =
  4×7 table
                  folder                        name           ext              date            bytes    isdir                      fullfilepath                  
    __________________________________    ________________    ______    ____________________    _____    _____    ________________________________________________
    "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\"    "dirtab"            ".m"      23-Apr-2018 15:35:22    3776     false    "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\dirtab.m"      
    "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\"    "license"           ".txt"    23-Apr-2018 15:57:12    1306     false    "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\license.txt"   
    "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\"    "mainDirTab"        ".m"      23-Apr-2018 17:32:53    2154     false    "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\mainDirTab.m"  
    "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\"    "wordpress_html"    ""        23-Apr-2018 17:33:13       0     true     "C:\Documents\MATLAB\potw\dirtab\wordpress_html"