What's the best way to read an ASCII/txt file containing a few lines of text and then the data I want to load into a matrix?

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I will have files converted to something like this:
Pad 1:1 /This is what the converter writes out /Not sure if it will have the same number of comments every time /information /more text
0.0 14.666
0.2 134.567
0.3 1567.435
... ...
and so forth. I want to read only the numerical data into a matrix to later work with and prefer it to not be a hack job, and something that will consistently read in many files. Thanks!
- Mark

Accepted Answer

Cedric
Cedric on 8 Oct 2013
Edited: Cedric on 8 Oct 2013
If you always have the same number of header lines, use TEXTSCAN and set the parameter 'HeaderLines' to a relevant value, e.g. 2 if you have two lines of header in each file.
In the example that you provided, it seems that you have have a line of text, an empty line, and then numbers, so you should be able to work with something like:
fid = fopen( 'myFile.txt', 'r' ) ;
data = textscan( fid, '%f%f', 'HeaderLines', 2 ) ;
fclose( fid ) ;
  6 Comments
Mark
Mark on 8 Oct 2013
Thank you for the help. I ended up checking for the comment delimiter and using fgetl until it hit the data. From there textscan just read the rest of the text file and only put in numbers. Thanks again
Cedric
Cedric on 8 Oct 2013
Edited: Cedric on 8 Oct 2013
You're welcome, just be careful not to loose the first line of data; if it was read by FGETL, it won't be read by TEXTSCAN as the file pointer was moved by FGETL after this line. This is why I have the concatenation in my last solution.

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