How do I stack many files together into one?

I have a large number of data runs saved in .dat files. Each data set may consist of up to 1000 separate files (each run has a file). I wish to stack them all together in one large matrix. What would the best way to do this? I can do it by hand but I would like to automate it as I have many sets to compile. The saved files have a final tag of spectraA1.dat, spectraA2.dat, etc. I want to compile into a master file say spectraA.dat. Does this make sense? All matrix in files are the same dimension.

[José-Luis]

Depends on what's inside your file.

Answer 1

[Mahdi]

One way of doing this

name='SpectraA'
for i=1:5 #Let's say you have SpectraA1....SpectraA5
Filename=strcat(name, num2str(i) , '.dat')
x(:,i)=load(Filename); # If it's a vector with one column
end

If the data is in a vector in one row, use:

x(i,:)=.....

instead

If they all have the same number of columns, you can do the following ( warning : not recommended to do it this way though, there are better ways):

name='SpectraA'
x=[];
for i=1:5 #Let's say you have SpectraA1....SpectraA5
Filename=strcat(name, num2str(i) , '.dat')
data1=load(Filename); # If it's a vector with one column
x=[x; data1];
end

[Jason]

data is saved as a row vector (with roughly 1000 entries).

Thanks for the help ! I'm just learning Matlab.

[Mahdi]

No problem. If the issue is resolved, please accept an answer.

Answer 2

[Joseph Cheng]

as you can do it by hand (i'm assuming you're manually opening and appending to the final file (fopen->fwrite at end of file->repeat) you can formulate that into a for loop. with that loop you can use the dir function to get all the *.dat files in a folder.

dir(fullfile(folder,('*.dat'))

this will get all the dat files hopefully in the order you want then use that list in your for loop.