Thread Subject:

Reading in XLS data containing numbers&strings

Hello,

I have a bunch of XLS files containing numerical data, that I'd like to read into Matlab (using xlsread); the problem is that all of these files have header rows, and so I always get a row full of NaN's at the start of each matrix that I read a file into.

Also, the naming of the columns is different from file to file, so I actually need that header information to know what each of the columns represents.

I know Matlab doesn't work well with strings, but is there any way for the cells that contain strings to be read correctly into Matlab?

Many thanks for any replies!

Hi Catalin,

You should use all three outputs so that you can keep track of the NaN'ified strings.

[numeric,txt,raw] = xlsread('file.xls');

raw keeps everything you want: numeric and text.

Best.

"Catalin Eberhardt" wrote in message <ir0o34$mc8$1@newscl01ah.mathworks.com>...
> Hello,
>
> I have a bunch of XLS files containing numerical data, that I'd like to read into Matlab (using xlsread); the problem is that all of these files have header rows, and so I always get a row full of NaN's at the start of each matrix that I read a file into.
>
> Also, the naming of the columns is different from file to file, so I actually need that header information to know what each of the columns represents.
>
> I know Matlab doesn't work well with strings, but is there any way for the cells that contain strings to be read correctly into Matlab?
>
> Many thanks for any replies!

Straight from the xlsread documentation:

[num, txt]= xlsread(filename, ...) returns numeric data in array num and text data in cell array txt. All cells in txt that correspond to numeric data contain the empty strin

or

[num, txt, raw] = xlsread(filename, ...) returns numeric and text data in num and txt, and unprocessed cell content in cell array raw, which contains both numeric and text data.

Many thanks for your replies, and apologies for obviously not having gone through the help for xlsread thoroughly enough!