Comparing strings with wildcards

Hi,

I have a number of strings that I'd like to check for a certain ending however the middle of the strings are all different (the middle of the strings are dates). They are of the format: wrfout****_PLEV or wrfout**** where ** is the date (all dates are of the same length). I basically want to find the strings that do not have _PLEV at the end.

I've tried using strcmp with wildcards but for some reason the creators decided it was a fantastic idea to ignore wildcards altogether which in my opinion negates a lot of potential uses of the strcmp function.

I've also tried using strncmp but that only allows you to specify the first n letters of a string to compare and not the last.

I then tried using simple inequalities, to obtain exactly which characters are the same, such as: 'wrfout****_PLEV == wrfout**** but as expected the different lengths of the strings prevented me from using this idea.

Any ideas as to how to do this or how to compare strings with wildcards would be very useful?

Thanks in advance James

Answer 1

[Joao Henriques]

There's a very simple way, just use regexptranslate:

regexp('abc123x', regexptranslate('abc*x'))

Will return 1 (beggining of matched string). If there's no match, regexp returns empty.

Documentation on regexptranslate

[Nick Powell]

Brilliant! Thanks

[Flurin Arner]

I wanted to add, that regexptranslate will throw an error 'MATLAB:minrhs Not enough input arguments.' like this.

You have to add 'wildcard', to regexptranslate() for it to work:

regexp('abc123x', regexptranslate('wildcard', 'abc*x'))

Answer 2

[the cyclist]

Use the regexp() function.