MATLAB: Do I receive inconsistent results when reading a TXT-file consisting of colons using the LOAD function in MATLAB 7.0.4 (R14SP2)

MATLAB

I have a TXT-file containing the following two lines of text:
1 2:3:4 5
5 7:8:9 0
When I use the LOAD function as follows:
   load textfile
I receive:
1 2 3 
4 5 5
However if I declare a matrix to contain the same data as in the TXT-file using the following commands:
a =  [1 2:3:4 5 ; 5 7:8:9 0]
MATLAB returns the following answer:
a = 1 2 5 
        5 7 0

Best Answer

This bug has been fixed in Release 14 Service Pack 3 (R14SP3). For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:
We have verified that there is a bug in MATLAB 7.0.4 (R14SP2) that causes LOAD to return inconsistent results when reading data in a TXT-file containing colons.
There are currently no known workarounds.
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