Well I guess this is one way. There are probably more elegant ways of unpacking the nested cell array and converting to numeric, but this is how I did it.
names = {'time_0.709'
'time_5.61'
'time_0.2081'
'time_45.027'
'time_90'};
filenums = str2double(regexprep(names,'.*_(?=(\d*\.*)+$)',''))
This looks for any number between an underscore and the end of each name. The filename prefix is ignored except for the underscore.
I guess if you wanted rely on the prefix, you could alternatively just do:
names = {'time_0.709'
'time_5.61'
'time_0.2081'
'time_45.027'
'time_90'};
filenums = str2double(strrep(names,'time_',''))
