Load Multiple .mat Files to Matlab workspace

Question

I\'m trying to load several .mat files to the workspace. However, they seem to overwrite each other. Instead, I want them to append. I am aware that I can do something li

Answer 1

It sounds like you have a situation in which each file contains a matrix variable A and you want to load into memory the concatenation of all these matrices along some dimension. I had a similar need, and wrote the following function to handle it.

function var = loadCat( dim, files, varname )
%LOADCAT Concatenate variables of same name appearing in multiple MAT files
%  
%   where dim is dimension to concatenate along,
%         files is a cell array of file names, and
%         varname is a string containing the name of the desired variable

    if( isempty( files ) )
        var = [];
        return;
    end
    var = load( files{1}, varname );
    var = var.(varname);

    for f = 2:numel(files),

        newvar = load( files{f}, varname );
            if( isfield( newvar, varname ) )
                var = cat( dim, var, newvar.(varname) );
            else
                warning( 'loadCat:missingvar', [ 'File ' files{f} ' does not contain variable ' varname ] );
            end
        end 

    end