MATLAB: Importing text files below

text file

Hi, I have trying to read the text file below where the first col is a string of different length, and it seem to be separated by a tab or something. Can anyone give some advice?

Thx

Symbol Description

1PG.AX 1-page Limited

AADKOA.AX Ardent Leisure Group

AAI.AX Alcoa Inc (USA CUFS)

Best Answer

textscan is going to be a robust and fast method to read this file:

fid = fopen('temp.txt','rt');
C = textscan(fid,'%s%[^\n]');
fclose(fid);

C{1} contains a cell array of the first column in the text file, C{2} contains all words after that. You could also use this to solve your earlier question in a much neater way:

http://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/180940-importing-text-files-like-above

The test text file is attached:

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Fgetl, textscan, and the file position indicator

That series is valid, yes.

Did you open the file with 'rt' instead of 'r' in order to account for the CRLF ?

Also note that if you use a count for textscan() then the file position will be left after the last format code is used, before the newline for that line (unless the end of format matches newline)

MATLAB: Does the character vector show up as ‘1xN char’ instead of the the actual characters in MATLAB Workspace and ‘uitable’ cell

This happens because of the presence of the 'newline' character in the character vector variable 'text1'.

You can use the 'strtrim' function to get rid of the 'newline' characters at the start or end of the character vector.

This will display the contents of the character vector in the MATLAB Workspace and in the 'uitable' cell.

Hence, modifying the given code as follows fixes the issue:

f = figure;
uit = uitable(f);
text1 = strtrim(['ab cd ef g' newline]);
text2 = 'ab cd ef gh';
text3 = '01234567891';
d = {text1,52,true;
    text2,40,true;
    text3,25,false};
uit.Data = d;

Note that this will only work for 'newline' characters at the start and end of character vectors.

If you have 'newline' characters somewhere in the middle of your character vectors, you will need to use the 'regexprep' to search and replace the 'newline' chars.

This can be done as follows:\n

text1 = regexprep(text1,'[\n\r]+',''); % on windows (to include the carriage return)
text1 = regexprep(text1,'\n',''); % on linux and macOS

Refer to the following MATLAB Answers link for a more detailed discussion on the topic of erasing 'newline' characters from strings in MATLAB:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/429327-how-to-erase-newline-character-from-string

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Fgetl, textscan, and the file position indicator

MATLAB: Does the character vector show up as ‘1xN char’ instead of the the actual characters in MATLAB Workspace and ‘uitable’ cell

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