MATLAB: Need help with textscan

discardtextscanvector

Hello,
I've been struggling with textscan for some time now, if anyone could point me in the right direction here I'd be eternally grateful.
I have a text file with data in the following format:
Eu3+ 1
     10.06037350        -4.673610300        -1.834337367    
   1.22604929765      -2.02696902730      0.734136756877    
   10517.3113705      -9795.46057045      -2441.96899290
… and this is repeated (1510 times, to be precise)
What I am trying to achieve (for the time being), is simply to extract the first 5 entries and define as a vector, so in this instance I would simply want something like
C = [ Eu3+ 1 10.06 -4.67 -1.83]
and then the following 6 entries can be discarded.
I have tried multiple variants of ideas, along the lines of:
C = textscan(fid,'%s%d8%f32%f32%f32');
But I am continually failing to produce the vector mentioned above.
Please, Matlab community, can you help me?
Kind regards,
Tom

Best Answer

Your are mixing strings with doubles. Try this out. You'll end up with a cell array containing the heading and the first three doubles.
fid = fopen('test.txt','r');
% read as single cell
C = textscan(fid,'%s ');
fclose(fid);
C = C{1,1}(1:4)
C = 
    'Eu3+1'
    '10.06037350'
    '-4.673610300'
    '-1.834337367'
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