Scanning data from cell array and removing based on file extensions - matlab

Question

I have a cell array that is a list of file names. I transposed them because I find that easier to work with. Now I am attempting to go through each line in each cell and remove the lines based on their file extension. Eventually, I want to use this list as file names to import data from. This is how I transpose the list
for i = 1:numel(F);
a = F(1,i);
b{i} = [a{:}'];
end;
The code I am using to try and read the data in each cell keeps giving me the error input must be of type double or string. Any ideas?
for i = 1:numel(b);
for k = 1:numel(b{1,i});
b(cellfun(textscan(b{1,i}(k,1),'%s.lbl',numel(b)),b))=[];
end;
end;
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: This is for MATLAB. Should have been clear on that. Thanks Brian.
EDIT2: whos for F is
Name Size Bytes Class Attributes
b 1x11 13986188 cell
while for a is
Name Size Bytes Class Attributes
a 1x1 118408 cell

Answer 1

From your description I am not certain how your F array looks, but assuming
F = {'file1.ext1', 'file2.ext2', 'file3.ext2', 'file2.ext1'};
you could remove all files ending with .ext2 like this:
F = F(cellfun('isempty', regexpi(F, '\.ext2$')));
regexpi, which operates on each element in the cell array, returns [] for all files not matching the expression. The cellfun call converts the cell array to a logical array with false at positions corresponding to files ending with .ext2and true for all others. The resulting array may be used as a logical index to F that returns the files that should be kept.

Answer 2

You're using cellfun wrong. It's signature is [A1,...,Am] = cellfun(func,C1,...,Cn). It takes a function as first argument, but you're passing it the result of textscan, which is a cell array of the matching strings. The second argument is a cell array as it should be, but it doesn't make sense to call it over and over in a loop. `cellfun´'s job is to write the loop for you when you want to do the same thing to every cell in a cell array.
Instead of parsing the filename yourself with textscan, I suggest you use fileparts
Since you're already looping over the cell array in transpose-step, it might make sense to do the filtering there. It might look something like this:
for i = 1:numel(F);
a = F(1,i);
[~,~,ext] = fileparts(a{:});
if strcmpi(ext, '.lbl')
b{i} = [a{:}'];
end
end;