Question

I have 100 .dat files in a folder. Is it possible to read all the files at once with MATLAB and do average of the 5th column of those 100 files? Here is a sample of one of the .dat files.

Answer 1

Here is some code to get you started:

%# get list of 100 .dat files
pathToFolder = '.';
files = dir( fullfile(pathToFolder,'*.dat') );

%# read all files
data = cell(numel(files),1);
for i=1:numel(files)
    fid = fopen(fullfile(pathToFolder,files(i).name), 'rt');
    H = textscan(fid, '%s', 4, 'Delimiter','\n');
    C = textscan(fid, repmat('%f ',1,8), 'Delimiter',' ', ...
        'MultipleDelimsAsOne',true, 'CollectOutput',true);
    fclose(fid);
    H = H{1}; C = C{1};

    %# store numeric data and ignore the header lines
    data{i} = C;
end

%# we assume all tables have the same size
data = cat(3,data{:});
mn = mean(data(:,5,:),3)    %# mean of 5th col across 100 files