Reading multi row comma delimited text file with strings into an nxm matrix

I need to read a text file of the following format:

string,string,string

.

.

.

string, string,string

into a matrix of strings that can be referred to through normal A(n,m) notation.

I have tried fscanf, csvread and importdata and readtable but find it impossible to get an nxm matrix that I can reference.

Advice would be great.

[Guillaume]

Prior to R2016b, you could only store strings (actually char matrices) into cell arrays. The syntax for accessing elements of cell arrays is only slightly different:

A{n, m}  %get element at row n column m of cell array A

Since R2016b, there's an actual string type that can be stored into matrices and thus accessed with the standard matrix notation. However, it's a matrix of string objects.

s(1,1) = string('some string');
s(2,2) = string('some other string');

Whichever version, you cannot store a char array (the standard 'this is a string') into a matrix since the char array is already a matrix (and you can't have matrices of matrices).

[Paul Nel]

Thanks for the assistance with which I managed to sort the code out in the following manner:

function [T] = io_test
clc; clear all ;
file_name = 'dependencies_risks.dat';
fd = fopen(file_name);
    S = textscan(fd,'%s','delimiter',',') ;
    S=S{1};
    filesize = size(S);
    filesize = filesize(1,1); %for some reason I cannot do size(S)(1,1)
    for m= 1:filesize:3
        for p = 1:int16(filesize/3)
            for n=1:3
                T(p,n)=S(3*p+n-3);
            end
        end
    end

      t=T(5,3);
  fclose(fd);
  end

Answer 1

[KSSV]

clc; clear all ;
fid = fopen('data.txt') ;
S = textscan(fid,'%s','delimiter','\n') ;
fclose(fid) ;
S = S{1} ;
% Remove empty cells
S = S(~cellfun('isempty',S)) ;
% Remove cells with '.'
S(not(cellfun('isempty', strfind(S,'.'))))=[];

[Paul Nel]

Thanks. The answer I was looking for however should convert my (string11, ..., string1n; stringn1...stringnn) file into an matrix such as this

A=[string11, ..., string1n; stringn1...stringnn].

Is this possible?

[KSSV]

Is the out put of code not in your expecting pattern? If not write those words in the way you want and show it here.

Answer 2

[Jan]

Strings cannot be stored in a "A(m,n)" matrix in Matlab. You can create a cell string instead. Use textscan with the comma as delimiter.