Question

Does Octave have a good way to let the user select an input file? I’ve seen code like this for Matlab, but doesn’t work in Octave.

A gui based method would be preferred, but some sort of command-line choice would work also. It would be great if there were some way to do this that would work in both Matlab and Octave.

I found this for Matlab but it does not work in Octave, even when you install Octave Forge Java package for the listdlg function. In Octave, dir() gives you:

  647x1 struct array containing the fields:

    name
    date
    bytes
    isdir
    datenum
    statinfo

but I don’t know how to convert this to an array of strings listdlg expects.

Answer 1

You have already the Octave Forge java package installed, so you can create instances of any java class and call any java method.

For example to create a JFileChooser and call the JFileChooser.showOpenDialog(Component parent) method:

frame = javaObject("javax.swing.JFrame");
frame.setBounds(0,0,100,100);
frame.setVisible(true);
fc = javaObject ("javax.swing.JFileChooser")
returnVal = fc.showOpenDialog(frame);
file = fc.getSelectedFile();
file.getName()

Btw. I had some troubles installing the package.
Here is a fix for Ubuntu. that worked also for my Debian Testing.

EDIT

@NoBugs In reply to your comment:

If you need to use listdlg you can do the following:

d = dir;
str = {d.name};
[sel,ok] = listdlg('PromptString','Select a file:',...
                'SelectionMode','single',...
                'ListString',str);
if ok == 1
    disp(str{sel(1)});
end

This should be compatible with matlab, by I cannot test it right now.

If you want to select multiple files use this:

d = dir;
str = {d.name};
[sel,ok] = listdlg('PromptString','Select a file:',...
                'SelectionMode','multiple',...
                'ListString',str);
if ok == 1
   imax = length(sel);
   for i=1:1:imax
      disp(str{sel(i)});
   end
end