MATLAB: Reading text file word by word

bad horrible ideafscanfMATLAB

Input is the attached text file, with one long word, a newline, then several equal-length short words separated by white spaces. I would like to read the first word in a variable, then the other ones in another variable one by one, rather than all into a single string or into a single huge cell array. I tried to do this with fscanf in several ways, but failed, and even got the impression that fscanf is not complying with https://fr.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fscanf.html no clue about what I am doing wrong.
fileID = fopen('dataset_300_8.txt');
long_word = fscanf(fileID, '%[$ACGT]'); % is there another way to stop reading at newline? 
short_word = ' ';
while ~isempty(short_word)
  short_word = fscanf(fileID, '%s'); % does not work: shouldn't %s stop as it encounters a white space?
  % short_word = fscanf(fileID, '%10s'); % this also does not work
  % short_word processing code here
end
fclose(fileID);

Best Answer

Try this minor change
short_word = fscanf(fileID, '%s+');
                               ↑
Edit: After further testing, any character after the %s gives the same results as it causes the fscanf to stop reading (due to mismatch). Another iteration begins where the previous attempt failed, so at the next word.
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