Read text file with multiple delimiters in a single row

Hi

I have some accelerometer data from an Arduino board (see attached test file showing 6 columns of data but with multiple delimiters on each row (commas and \t)). Each row of data (fron 2nd row onwards) features a high precision time stamp, type, arduino time, X, Y and Z components). I'm not sure how how to separate the data into individual columns using textscan.

2nd line of data:

1643148827196364700,0.92554\t0.34692\t0.15991 translates to: 16:43:14.882 (time stamp) 7196364700 (type and arduino time - honestly I'm not sure what the split is here) 0.92554 9 (X) 0.34692 (Y) 0.15991 (Z)

Can someone please help?

data_dir = '/MATLAB Drive/Arduino Accel';
test_id = 'Test';
path = fullfile(data_dir,strcat(test_id,'.txt'));
fid = fopen(path, 'rt');
tline = fgetl(fid);
headers = strsplit(tline, ',');
%% datacell = textscan(fid, ....???
% fclose(fid);

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Your timestamps are too low precision for it to be reasonable that you stop at milliseconds -- you have too many values that are the same to within the millisecond. It makes more sense if you assume that more digits are allocated to time. When I look at the plots, I cannot really tell the difference between 3 extra or 4 extra digits; 3 seems more common so I coded for that.

filename = 'https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/873970/Test.txt';
S = urlread(filename);

data = textscan(S, '%2f%2f%2f%3f%3f%7u,%f\\t%f\\t%f', 'HeaderLines', 1)

data = 1×9 cell array
    {730×1 double}    {730×1 double}    {730×1 double}    {730×1 double}    {730×1 double}    {730×1 uint32}    {730×1 double}    {730×1 double}    {730×1 double}

Ts = duration(data{1}, data{2}, data{3}, data{4} + data{5}/1E3);
TaAT = data{6};
X = data{7};
Y = data{8};
Z = data{9};

figure
plot(Ts); title('time')

figure
plot(Ts-Ts(1), [X-mean(X), Y-mean(Y), Z-mean(Z)]); legend({'X', 'Y', 'Z'});

format long g
seconds(Ts(end)-Ts(1))

ans = 
      0.000501000002026558

figure
plot3(X, Y, Z); title('X Y Z'); xlabel('x'); ylabel('y'); zlabel('z')