MATLAB: Returning negetive numbesr from text file using regexp

MATLABregexp formatting

Hi! I'm writing code that takes a text file containing three seperate variables of numbers, time, x-displacement and y-displacement.
The three variables are all surounded by unique spacers like '&&*' and ',,,*' I've used fileread and regexp to read the file and put all numbers into an array, only issue is that they all become possitive, when some of the y-displacement values need to be negetive.
experiment = ('(?<=*[^0-9]*)[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+');
inputText = str2double(regexp(dataFile,experiment, 'match'))
Thanks for any help
Jack

Best Answer

With questions like these it's very helpful to have an example of waht exactly your data looks like. If you know exactly how your spacers look like, you could also try strsplit (https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/strsplit.html?searchHighlight=strsplit&s_tid=doc_srchtitle) which can detect multiple delimiters.
If you want to use regular expressions, add '\-' in yout brackets, to also match the minus-sign
(?<=[^0-9])([0-9\-]*)\.*([0-9\-]+)
I tested it with &&-1234...-4562 here https://regex101.com/, which gave me an error for the '*' inside the lookbehind.
str = '&&-1234...4562';
vals = cell2mat(cellfun(@str2double, regexp(str,'(?<=[^0-9])([0-9\-]*)\.*([0-9\-]+)', 'tokens'), 'UniformOutput', false))
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