MATLAB: Select/ Short rows from ASCII files

ascii - select / sort rows

Hello,
I work with very large ASCII file, as the below sample
STOCK DATE TIME PRICE
ETE 04/01/2010 10170000 18.54 430 Big Cap
ABC 04/01/2010 10190000 18.34 200 Big Cap
YYY 04/01/2010 10200000 18.34 100 Big Cap
which is TAB delimited and sorted by TIME as above.
How can I select rows with respect to the column 'STOCK'
for instance selecting only the rows for the stock 'ABC' ?
In case these are not then sorted by time, how can I sort them by TIME?
Many thanks in advance.
Panos

Best Answer

Import your ASCII file first. If you could make the data like the format below, it's straightforward to use ismember() and sort() function to achieve what you want.
Data={'ETE' '04/10/2010 10170000' 18.54 430 'Big Cap';
'ABC' '04/01/2010 10190000' 18.34 200 'Big Cap';
'YYY' '04/01/2010 10200000' 18.34 100 'Big Cap';
'ABC' '04/02/2010 10190000' 18.54 300 'Big Cap';}
Ind=ismember(Data(:,1),'ABC')
Stock_ABC=Data(Ind,:)
[Trash,Ind]=sort(datenum(Data(:,2),'mm/dd/yyyy HHMMSSFFF'));
Stock_Sorted=Data(Ind,:)
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