MATLAB: Secify what is the end of a line using textscan

end of linesendoflinesheaderlinestextscan

I have a .dat file with varied spacing between a series of numbers. I want to be able to jump to any one of these numbers using textscan with its 'headerlines' feature. The problem is, I need to specify that each separate number should be a new line. That way if is use 'headerlines',2 in textscan it will skip the first two numbers and go from there.
My .dat file starts like this
      1      55      63       78  45.6  34.6  45.7  23.5  23.7  34.5  23.6 ...
how can I make textscan see line one as 1… line two as 55… line three as 63… line four as 78 etc? I know about the 'EndOfLine' feature and have tried everything with that but it's still not giving me what I need.
Thanks
-Kyle

Best Answer

I would not do it that way. What I would do is something like:
fid =  fopen(YourFileName, 'rt');
wantpos = 3;  %want 3rd number
fmt = [repmat('%*f', 1, wantpos-1), '%f'];
datacell = textscan(fid, fmt, 1);
wantednum = datacell{1};
fclose(fid);
This can be used even if you have fewer numbers per line than "wantpos": it will read as many lines as it needs to in order to get the proper number.
Afterwards the file will be positioned right after the number that was read.
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