MATLAB: How to import specific columns from a text file

data importdlmreadimportMATLABtext filetext;

I have a rather lengthy script that I am tasked with fixing. The script pulls data from a .txt file, does some calculations, and plots data.
The script currently uses dlmread to open the .txt file, but this no longer works because a new data format (a notes column text instead of numeric data) was added in the middle of the columns of the text file. Now whenever the script gets to the point of the text file, there is a mismatch in data type and I get this error message.
Error using dlmread (line 147)
Mismatch between file and format character vector.
Trouble reading 'Numeric' field from file
Is it possible to tell Matlab to 'skip' over this one notes column while still using dlmread in the text file? Somehow choose columns 1-10 and 12-25 or something along those lines. I tried using readtable, but that got me a large table that I then couldn't convert back into the double arrays that the script originally started with. Trying to read the table and then convert to an excel spreadsheet didn't work either.

Best Answer

You can use readtable() to read the data from text file in the form of a table and then delete appropriate columns. For example
data = readtable(filename);
data(:,11) = []; will delete column 11
If then you want to convert the table to a matrix so that it match with the output of dlmread() to make it compatible with remaining code then use
data = table2array(data);
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