How to open a file and store it in cell array?

I am creating a function that opens a text file that has {8795 x 3} of data dividied in Time, Dominant Wave Perdiod, and significant_wave_height_2.

What I want is to organize this data in a 8794 rows with three columns cell array for later use

Note: I put 8794 rows because I want to ignore the first row that contains the captions.

A sample of the first 10 rows of the data goes like this,

 Time[GMT]  dominant_wave_period_2[s](0m)  significant_wave_height_2[m](0m)
6/4/2012 13:30  10.67  0.5
6/4/2012 14:00  8  0.56
6/4/2012 14:30  8  0.49
6/4/2012 15:00  8  0.43
6/4/2012 15:30  2  0.24
6/4/2012 16:00  2.29  0.32
6/4/2012 16:30  2.67  0.38
6/4/2012 17:00  2.91  0.46
6/4/2012 17:30  3.2  0.42

and I want to store them in the variables [Time, dominant_wave_period_2, significant_wave_height_2]

I would like to know a command of file open to generate this in the workspace as a cell array.

Could you please help?

Answer 1

[Muthu Annamalai]

See documentation pages for, fopen, fgetl, fread, fscanf, fclose

>> doc fgetl

Function fgetl, fread and fscanf return the character strings; so you have to use str2double() on column 2, 3 if you want to store them as numeric types.

I'm not going to solve your problem - you have enough hints to proceed. This should be a fun exercise.

Hint: http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fgetl.html

Answer 2

[Babak]

 YourFilePath = 'C:\My Documents\Myfolder1\myfile.txt';

 fid = fopen(YourFilePath ,'w');
 fprintf(fid,'whatever I want to write in the text file')
 fclose(fid);

[Babak]

You need to create the cell array first and then start opening the text file and write to it... you can write in the txt file by fprintf() command as shown above. If you have your data already stored in [Time, dominant_wave_period_2, significant_wave_height_2], then you can put them in the txt file like this:

 for j= 1:size(Time,2)
fprintf(fid,'%s  %d  %s \n', Time{j},dominant_wave_period_2{j},significant_wave_height_2{j});
 end