MATLAB: I need to efficiently skip lines in text file

fgetlformatted dataMATLABskip linestext files

I'm reading in a formatted text data file and pulling data from it. Every so often there is a break in the data and its 4 lines long. I'm reading the lines with "fgetl" and right now to skip those lines I just use
for i = 1:4
    line = fgetl(fileID);    
end
This seems terribly inefficient and brute force. Is there a better way?
–Clarification The skipped lines have information in them, just information I don't use. I'm also trying to avoid saving any information temporarily for the skipped lines.

Best Answer

Repeated fgetl() is going to be more efficient than what the others have shown here when you are working with text files. fgetl() is a low-level routine that talks directly to the I/O stream used by the operating system libraries.
If you were working with non-text files (that is you did not use the 't' flag when you opened them) and if you knew exactly how many bytes the 4 lines occupied in total including the line delimiters, then you could fseek() forward that many bytes.
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