Importing NetCDF files: Script stops when a variable is missing from a file.

Found this script that I'm running when importing NetCDF files. It seems to work fine, but whenever a variabel is missing from a file the script will stop(or atleast i believe this to be the reason). It's seems that the salinty variabel is mostly related to the problem. Is there any way i can skip over these files?

ncvars =  {'LATITUDE', 'LONGITUDE', 'PSAL', 'PRES'};
projectdir = 'C:\some\location';
dinfo = dir( fullfile(projectdir, '*.nc') );
num_files = length(dinfo);
filenames = fullfile( projectdir, {dinfo.name} );
lats = cell(num_files, 1);
lons = cell(num_files, 1);
salinity = cell(num_files, 1);
times = cell(num_files, 1);
for K = 1 : num_files
  this_file = filenames{K};
  lats{K} = ncread(this_file, ncvars{1});
  lons{K} = ncread(this_file, ncvars{2});
  salinity{K} = ncread(this_file, ncvars{3});
  times{K} = ncread(this_file, ncvars{4});
end

Here's there error messages:

Error using internal.matlab.imagesci.nc/getGroupAndVarid (line 2096)
Could not find variable or group 'PSAL' in file.

Error in internal.matlab.imagesci.nc/read (line 593)
            [gid, varid] = getGroupAndVarid(this, location);

Error in ncread (line 66)
vardata = ncObj.read(varName, varargin{:});

Error in Hydropraphy (line 14)
  sal{K} = ncread(filen, variabler{3});
 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

Use ncinfo to determine if the variable exists in the file before you to try to read it.

[johndoe]

Thanks for the answer! Can i put this in the script in some way? I have roughly 100 000 NetCDF files to import.

[Sean de Wolski]

info = ncinfo(file(K))
names = {info.Variables.Name}
if ismember('your_name', names)
    process_file_K
else
    dont_process_file_K
end

[johndoe]

Thanks! I got it to work with try, catch and end. But this seems more legit, will definetly try it out :)