Multiple .DAT files

Hello, i'm relatively new to using matlab and was wondering if any one could help me?

I have a large file of data containing around a thousand .dat files all with information I need to extract into separate variables. The file names are all in the format,

data_1995-01-01_metric.dat

data_1995-01-02_metric.dat

etc

There is supposed to be a file for each day of the year but some files are missing and I need them to be replaced with zeros so I can create a time series for a year. All files have the same amount of characters. I'm having trouble creating a loop to read all the data, can anyone help me out?

Many thanks