Reading file names with case insensitivity

Hello I do a decent amount of Matlab programming in both Windows and Linux, and also use Dropbox of my means for sharing files between both operating systems.

When I save an stl file in windows it saves it as example.stl when I open that file again in Linux it makes it example.STL This forces me to either rename every stl file to be lowercase when I am in Linux or to switch my Matlab code to have stl uppercase.

Is there a way I can read in file names and not be case sensitive?

Answer 1

[Mischa Kim]

You could use the lower command to convert the file name string to lower case, before opening the file.

 lower('example.STL')
 ans =
 example.stl

[Image Analyst]

Right. When I need to check on a certain filename, like I'm processing a list and I want to do something special when I get to a certain file, I cast to lower.

if strfind(lower(filename), 'calibration') > 0  
    % Calibration is in the filename so do something special...

If you're using strcmp(), you can use strcmpi() instead.

[Ryan]

It ended up working fine on Windows (where example.stl was) but did not work on Linux (where exmaple.STL), I ended up using this instead:

if exist('example.stl')~=2 pelvis = stlread('example.STL'); else pelvis = stlread('example.stl'); end

It looks a little messy but works fine, only thing now is its giving me a warning that for the exist command I should give it a data type, but I was unable to find on what data type to use for stl files with Matlab

[Image Analyst]

Try

exist('example.stl', 'dir')