textscan not working with double quotation marks

I am using textscan to read a .txt file into matlab but i am having some troubles. The data looks like (first two lines)

1950  "Afghanistan"  8150.368   n/a   n/a    n/a  n/a   n/a   
1951  "Afghanistan"  8284.473   n/a   n/a    n/a  n/a   n/a  

and i am using textscan as

PWT = 'Data ind\PWT6.txt';
fid =fopen(PWT);
tmp = textscan(fid,'%f %q %f %f %f %f %f %f','delimiter','\r'); 

The first column is read ok, the countries are all stored on tmp{1}, but it seems like all the rest is stored in tmp{2} when i actually only want the countries there. Am i using %q wrong or what is going on ?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

"delimiter" is the character used to recognize the end of strings, so when you use \r you are asking the string to go to the end of the line.

What you should do is fopen(PWT, 'rt') for text mode, and not set a delimiter.

That does seem to work, i get the data into 8 cells now. But because of the no delimiter i only get the first row, how can i get all the data into 8 cells without using a for loop ?

ps. i guess it is mostly solved, but i would like to avoid for loop if there is a smarter way to do it

thanks

Add

treatAsEmpty', 'n/a'

at the end of the textscan() call

It isnt really working, are you sure it isnt because i am using %q ?

What result are you observing?

Well i run

PWT = 'Data ind\PWT6.txt';
fid=fopen(PWT,'rt');  
tmp = textscan(fid,'%f%q%f%f%f%f%f%f');                          
celldisp(tmp)

And it then returns only the first line of the document, for some reason i dont think it recognizes the line change meaby ?

You did not add the treatasempty option

tmp = textscan(fid,'%f%q%f%f%f%f%f%f','TreatAsEmpty', 'n/a');

Also remember to fclose(fid) afterwards.

I added the treatasempty option and i also realized that i had stupidly taken the wrong format, there are 10 variables not 8 ! this gave me quite a headache :)

Thanks for all the help Walter, it was immensely helpful.

Thanks :)