Matlab: Renaming files in a folder sequentially - matlab

Question

If there are the following files in the folder C:\test\:
file1.TIF, file2.TIF .... file100.TIF
Can MatLab automatically rename them to:
file_0001.TIF, file_0002.TIF, .... file_0100.TIF?

Answer 1

No-loop approach -
directory = 'C:\test\'; %//' Directory where TIFF images are present
filePattern = fullfile(directory, 'file*.tif'); %//' files pattern with absolute paths
old_filename = cellstr(ls(filePattern)) %// Get the filenames
file_ID = strrep(strrep(old_filename,'file',''),'.TIF','') %// Get numbers associated with each file
str_zeros = arrayfun(#(t) repmat('0',1,t), 5-cellfun(#numel,file_ID),'uni',0) %// Get zeros string to be pre-appended to each filename
new_filename = strcat('file_',str_zeros,file_ID,'.TIF') %// Generate new filenames
cellfun(#(m1,m2) movefile(m1,m2),fullfile(directory,old_filename),fullfile(directory,new_filename)) %// Finally rename files with the absolute paths
Edit 1:
For a case when you have the filenames as file27.TIF, file28.TIF, file29.TIF and so on and you would like to rename them as file0001.TIF, file0002.TIF, file0003.TIF and so on respectively, try this -
directory = 'C:\test\'; %//' Directory where TIFF images are present
filePattern = fullfile(directory, 'file*.tif'); %//' files pattern with absolute paths
old_filename = cellstr(ls(filePattern)) %// Get the filenames
file_ID = strrep(strrep(old_filename,'file',''),'.TIF','') %// Get numbers associated with each file
file_ID_doublearr = str2double(file_ID)
file_ID_doublearr = file_ID_doublearr - min(file_ID_doublearr)+1
file_ID = strtrim(cellstr(num2str(file_ID_doublearr)))
str_zeros = arrayfun(#(t) repmat('0',1,t), 4-cellfun(#numel,file_ID),'uni',0) %// Get zeros string to be pre-appended to each filename
new_filename = strcat('file',str_zeros,file_ID,'.TIF') %// Generate new filenames
cellfun(#(m1,m2) movefile(m1,m2),fullfile(directory,old_filename),fullfile(directory,new_filename)) %// Finally rename files with the absolute paths

Answer 2

A slightly more robust method:
dirlist = dir(fullfile(mypath,'*.TIF'));
fullnames = {dirlist.name}; % Get rid of one layer of cell array-ness
[~,fnames,~] = cellfun(#fileparts,fullnames,'UniformOutput',false); % Create cell array of the file names from the output of dir()
fnums = cellfun(#str2double,regexprep(fnames,'[^0-9]','')); % Delete any character that isn't a number, returns it as a vector of doubles
fnames = regexprep(fnames,'[0-9]',''); % Delete any character that is a number
for ii = 1:length(dirlist)
newname = sprintf('%s_%04d.TIF',fnames{ii},fnums(ii)); % Create new file name
oldfile = fullfile(mypath,dirlist(ii).name); % Generate full path to old file
newfile = fullfile(mypath,newname); % Generate full path to new file
movefile(oldfile, newfile); % Rename the files
end
Though this will accomodate filenames of any length, it does assume that there are no numbers in the filename other than the counter at the end. MATLAB likes to throw things into nested cell arrays, so I incorporated cellfun in a couple places to bring things into more manageable formats. It also allows us to vectorize some of the code.