Reading certain parts of text file

Hi,

I'm trying to access certain parts of a text to process data. The text file has a header and many rows of numbers, starting at lines 13 through 4016 is a two column array. This is comma delimited. It would be nice to track information of this file located in the header but firstly I just want to bring all of these numbers into Matlab for processing. The formats don't change per text file just the numbers.

Thanks for your help, Alex

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

a=importdata('file.txt')
data=a.data

[ALEX]

Thanks for the response, I just tried this, the end result is a scalar of some number. I'm trying to produce a 40??x2 array for each file.

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

what do you mean? and post a sample of your file

[ALEX]

SOURCE FILE NAME: H:\Research 2013\alex pullout\c#6_6_1.DTA
DATE: Monday, July 08, 2013
TIME: 15:40:56
SAMPLE INTERVAL (Seconds):   0.0000020000
SIGNAL UNITS: volts
TIME UNITS: Seconds
DATA TYPE: WAVEFORM
NUMBER OF DATA POINTS PER WAVEFORM: 4096
CHANNEL NUMBER: 2
HIT NUMBER: 2
TIME OF TEST: 416.0837267

          0,  0.00061035
          1,  0.00030518
          2,  0.00000000
          3, -0.00030518
          4, -0.00061035
          5,  0.00000000
          6, -0.00030518
          7,  0.00000000
          8,  0.00000000
          9,  0.00030518
         10,  0.00061035
         11,  0.00061035
         12,  0.00091553
         13,  0.00061035
         14,  0.00061035
         15,  0.00000000
         16,  0.00000000
         17,  0.00030518

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

fid=fopen('file.txt')
out=textscan(fid,'%f %f','HeaderLines',12,'Delimiter',',')
fclose(fid)
M=cell2mat(out)

[ALEX]

I figured it out, there is a special function that does all of this hands free.

num = csvread(filename,13,0)

this data is already comma delimited, so I could open it as a txt file without any problems. If there aren't commas it might not be so easy.

this youtube video was helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxi_BJC2UFY