I have files being generated by another program/user that have names such as “jh-1.txt, jh-2.txt, …, jh-100.txt, …, jh-1024.txt”. I’m extracting a column from these files, manipulating the data, and outputting to a new matrix. The only problem is that Octave is using ASCII ordering and not natural ordering when reading in the files. Thus, the output matrix is not ordered in a natural way. My question is, can Octave sort file names in a natural order? I’m getting file names in the standard method:
fileDirectory = '/path/to/directory';
filePattern = fullfile(fileDirectory, '*.txt'); % Selects only the txt files.
dataFiles = dir(filePattern); % Gets the info from the txt files in the directory.
baseFileName = {dataFiles.name}'; % Gets all the txt file names.
I can’t rename the files because this is a script for another user. They are on a Windows machine and already have Octave installed with Cygwin and I don’t want to make them use the command line more than they have to because they are unfamiliar with it. Alternatively, it would be nice to have the output with the file names in a column but, I haven’t figured that one out either (bit of a noob with Octave myself). That way the user could use Excel (which they are familiar with) to sort the columns.
I don’t think there’s a built in natural sort in Octave. However, there is a natural sort submission on Mathwork’s File Exchange. I’ve not used it, but the comments imply it works in Octave too.