MATLAB: Is there a way to read only two columns of a file with textscan

MATLABtextscan

%Get events from text file
prompt_totalfiles = 'Enter number of files you want to input: '; %asks for number of files
total_files = input(prompt_totalfiles);
fileids = cell(total_files,1);
j = 1;
Baseline_adjustment = 0.1; %put in baseline photodetector value here (the readout with the led on but the patch cable in pitch black
wholedff = cell(1, 11);
for file = 1:total_files
[inputfile,path] = uigetfile('*.txt');
fileids{file} = fopen(fullfile(path, inputfile));
if fileids{file} == -1
    error('Failed to open file "%s"', fullfile(path, inputfile));
end
b = textscan(fileids{file},'%n %n',-1, 'delimiter', '/t');
events = b{1};
event_times = b{2};
I am trying to use this code to read in only the first two columns of the text file. However, it doesn't seem to work: what I obtain is a 1×2 cell with [3;1] in the first column and [819;0] in the second one.
Instead, it should be [3; 3; 2; 1; 4; 5; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0] and [819; 826; 2279; 3427; 3907; 3919; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0].
Thanks!

Best Answer

There are 7 columns in the file image you posted. You can ignore a specific column by putting a * between the % and the descriptor.
Try it with this example (to read only the first 2 columns): 
b = textscan(fileids{file},'%n %n %*n %*n %*n %*n %*n',-1, 'delimiter', '/t');
This will not fill the unread columns with 0, it will simply ignore them.
I do not have your file to test this with, so you may need to experiment to get it to do what you want.
See formatSpec for a full discussion.
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