ONLY load matfiles that contain a variable

Hi Guys,

I want to detect if a .mat file contains a variable before the script loads it. for the script that I am writing I only want one data set and there are 8297 files to check, so to save time and prevent crashes I only want to load faultsActiveList. However because there are not always faults active it is not always present.

 DATA = load(MATfile,'faultsActiveList')

please bear in mind allthough I am the author of many of the scripts I use I do use some that others in my company wrote and they are p.coded so I cannot effect how the data comes to me.

Many Thanks James

Answer 1

[Friedrich]

Hi,

you can use whos to see if there are any variables in the mat file and which ones:

info = whos('-file','myfile.mat')

info will be a structure of size nx1 where n is the amount of variables in the matfile. In addition the field name will tell you the names of the variables in the mat file.

So you can do

info = whos('-file','myfile.mat')
if any(strcmp({info.name},'faultsActiveList'))
    load('myfile.mat','faultsActiveList')
end

[James hall]

Thanks very much Friedrich, works perfectly

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

if isempty(who('faultsActiveList', '-file', MATfile))
  ... not there ...
end