Help definitely needed! How do I load multiple txt files and change the varible names of each to include the date from file

Hey everyone,

My coding skills have clearly dies on me with this one. I have a few txt files in directory that I am using textscan to load (massive files so I want to reduce memory). I would like a loop that goes through the list, loads in data into the workspace and gives each dataset a variable name that includes the date from the file name.

My file names are like this one midas_wind_198001-198012.txt from 1979-2013.

Here is the code I have thus far for loading but I am stuck on taking it further to renaming the variables. I do not want to use EVAL for efficiency reasons and I would like each dataset to be its own variable

fid = fopen('midas_wind_197701-197712.txt', 'r'); 
C = textscan(fid,'%s %s %f %f %s %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %s %f', 'Delimiter',','); 
fclose(fid);

Thanks a lot in advance!!

Answer 1

[David Young]

Much better to use arrays rather than having different variable names. Have a look at structure arrays and cell arrays in the documentation.