How do I skip an error in a loop?

I have a for loop that opens and checks excel files, however it has been returning errors of such

Error using
Interface.Microsoft_Excel_14.0_Object_Library.Workbooks/Open
Invoke Error, Dispatch Exception:
Source: Microsoft Excel
Description: Excel cannot open the file
'interesting.xlsx' because the
file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file
has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the
format of the file.
Help File: xlmain11.chm
Help Context ID: 0

So I try to locate the file and manually open it and it does returns me the same error of "Excel cannot open the file 'interesting.xlsx' because the file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file."

My goal here is not to fix the file, since I have a lot of files to read, some files may have problems, and I believe it is not a code problem, so I want to skip the problematic files and continue my loop.

Any suggestions? Thank you!

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

You can use try:

for k = ...
    try
        your code here
    catch
        fprintf('loop number %d failed\n',k)
    end
end

[chlor thanks]

A few questions,

what specific code of mine should I paste under try?

what if I don't want any error message? Do I leave the line under catch blank?

Thanks Stephen! So glad to see you again :D

[chlor thanks]

for example, can I do

for fileidx = 1:numel(filelist)
    try
    workbook = excel.Workbooks.Open(filelist{fileidx}, false, true);
    catch
    end
end

Like this..?

[Guillaume]

If you don't want to take any particular action and just ignore the error you can simply omit the catch part:

try
   %some code that may error
end
%if an error occurs in the try block, execution continues from here
%... some more code

[chlor thanks]

Wow, this is how it works! Thank you Guillaumeee