MATLAB: Readtable() interpreting HEX as scientific

MATLABreadtable hex scientific

I have a script that is importing a csv file that contains decimal and hexadecimal values. Currently I am only utilizing the HEX values. The issue I have is occassionally the data has a value of something like 6E60 which matlab interprets as scientific and then errors on the hex2dec function. Is there a function that would suit better to avoid this issue or is there a format setting which I can apply prior to the readtable function to interpret the csv data as text?
Here are the relevant lines:
clear
clc
format short
warning('OFF', 'MATLAB:table:ModifiedVarnames')
[baseName, folder] = uigetfile({'*.csv';'*.xls';'*.xlsx';'*.txt'},'Select File for Table Data');
file = fullfile(folder, baseName);
The resulting variable is used to create a dataset from a search function
DataSet=csvData(r,:);
avgval=3.3*mean(hex2dec(DataSet.measurement))/65536;
avgval is the line that has issues.

Best Answer

In recent versions of matlab, the easiest would be to use detectImportOptions and override the relevant variable type to force it to char. However, R2015a predates detectImportOptions (introduced in R2016b). The only way for you to override the automatic type detection is to specify the 'Format' property in the readtable call. Unfortunately, that means you have to specify the format of all columns and know the exact number of columns rather than letting readtable work that out for you.
It would be something like:
data = readtable('yourfile', 'Format', '%f%f%s%s%f'); %for a file with 6 columns
where '%s' forces the corresponding column to be read as text regardless of its content.
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