concatenate multiple blocks of CSV's with empty rows

I would like to open a number of CSV files like the attached dummy example "MatLab_example_csv.csv" with varying data values in rows 8-45, exctract one column, say column A, with it's data label in row 7, and make a concatenated table whose columns are the extracted column A's from the original CSV's and save to CSV or XLSX like "MatLab_example_concatenated". The "MatLab_example_csv.csv" files have an empty row 5:

If I use "importdata" to import "MatLab_example_csv.csv" it stops importing at the empty row, omitting the data of interest:

If I use "readtable" to read "MatLab_example_csv.csv" the entire contents are read in but it looks like "readtable" assigns variable names to each column:

I can select the section from this table I want, but since I am selecting the same section (data in column A) from each CSV I will open, one way or the other each time it will have the same variable name:

If this is in a "while" loop in code, when it go to concatenate the section from the second CSV file into an agregated table "agg", I get error for having duplicate variable names:

>> agg=double.empty

>> agg=[agg t_sec];

>> agg=[agg t_sec];

Duplicate variable name: 'x_CSVA_01_01'.

Thanks in advance for suggestion how to read and concatenate the blocks from CSV's into one table!

[And_Or]

You cannot add a variable that already exists in the table. In your case, you are trying to concatenate a table that contains the variable "x_CSVA_01_01" two times.

One option could be to rename the variable that is inside the table. You can access the name of the variable through the properties. In your case:

t_sec.Properties.VariableNames

It should return a 1x1 cell array {'x_CSVA_01_01'}, which maybe you can rename using a counter inside the while loop.

Another option is to convert the table to a array, and concatenate all the elements as a 2D array. You could use:

t_sec =  table2array(t_sec)

This will convert your 1 column table to a 1 column array. Once you have all the columns concatenated, you can convert the array to a table again using the array2table function. You could finally rename the columns as I have mentioned before, accesing the properties of the table.

Hope it is helpful.

[LINAS JAUNISKIS]

thanks, I was moving in the direciton of woring in an array....any way to get "importdata" to not stop at an empty row?

[And_Or]

If you use xlsread instead of importdata, it will return NaN values for your empty rows. You can also use readtable function, that will detect NaN values, and then convert tables to arrays.