MATLAB: Importing data with multiple delimiters

data importdelimiter

Here is an example of my dataset…
-1  1:6.000000 2:148.000000 3:72.000000 4:35.000000 5:0.000000 6:33.599998 7:0.627000 8:50.000000
+1  1:1.000000 2:85.000000 3:66.000000 4:29.000000 5:0.000000 6:26.600000 7:0.351000 8:31.000000
-1  1:8.000000 2:183.000000 3:64.000000 4:0.000000 5:0.000000 6:23.299999 7:0.672000 8:32.000000
+1  1:1.000000 2:89.000000 3:66.000000 4:23.000000 5:94.000000 6:28.100000 7:0.167000 8:21.000000
The current delimiter is whitespace. While that is correct, I do not want to import the semicolons or the numbers before the semicolons. Is there a simple way to do this?

Best Answer

 fmt = ['%f' repmat('%*f:%f', 1, 8)];
 textscan(fid, fmt, 'CollectInput', 1)
That will give a cell with one entry with the one entry being a numeric array, with the first column being the +1 and -1, and the other entries being the floating point numbers.
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