(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials blog.)

Very often MATLAB users want to be able to process a set of files from a directory. In this video, I show how you can look through a directory seeking files of the form “data###.dat” and then returning the “###” as a number with any leading zeros removed. This makes use of regular expressions, but does not explain their theory much at all.

This is not the first time this kind of thing has been discussed. Check out Loren’s take, or Steve’s take from their blogs.