Marshall - if all of your target strings (the csv filenames) have an open bracket *(* in them, and you want all the characters before that, then you could use a strfind call to get the index of the open bracket, and then copy all characters up to that index. Something like
target = 'Some Test Performed [12345678987_HS1 (further info including dates and temperatures)].csv';
idx = strfind(target, '(');
if ~isempty(idx)
match = strtrim(target(1:idx-1));
end
which would return
match =
Some Test Performed [12345678987_HS1
However, if the open bracket rule is not valid for all cases, then you could try simplifying your pattern to
pattern = '.+[HL]S[\d\s]';
where
.+ means match on one or more single characters including whitespace (the plus sign means one or more);
[HL]S means a single character match on either H or L followed by an S; and
[\d\s] means match on either a single numeric character or any whitespace character.
So with your two target strings above, using this pattern we would see
target1 = 'Some Test Performed [12345678987_HS1 (further info including dates and temperatures)].csv';
target2 = 'Some Other Test [123456_LS (further info including dates and temperatures)].csv';
pattern = '.+[HL]S[\d\s]';
match1 = regexp(target1,pattern,'match');
match2 = regexp(target2,pattern,'match');
with
match1 =
'Some Test Performed [12345678987_HS1'
match2 =
'Some Other Test [123456_LS '
A problem with the above pattern may occur when there are additional HS or LS characters that follow the first pattern match. For example, if your target is
target3 = 'Some HS Test Performed [12345678987_HS1 (further info including dates and HS temperatures)].csv';
match3 = regexp(target3,pattern,'match')
then string is found to be
match3 =
'Some HS Test Performed [12345678987_HS1 (further info including dates and HS '
So you may want to narrow down the pattern to that where a numeric string followed by an underscore precedes your original pattern
newPattern = '.+\d+_[HL]S[\d\s]';
match3 = regexp(target3,newPattern,'match')
which returns the desired
match3 =
'Some HS Test Performed [12345678987_HS1'
This new pattern will work for the other two targets as well.
Note that for the second match, we have a trailing whitespace character. You may want to wrap your regexp with a strtrim to remove it.
