MATLAB: Using textscan to skip specific rows

Question

Right now I'm interested in using textscan to read specific rows of a .csv file which looks something like this:

 type    value    latency
 92      trigger  19593
 type    value    latency
 20      trigger  20000
 type    value    latency
 14      trigger  21000
 type    value    latency
 14      trigger  21000
 type    value    latency
 14      trigger  21000
 type    value    latency
 14      trigger  21000
 type    value    latency
 14      trigger  21000
 type    value    latency
 14      trigger  21000
 type    value    latency
 14      trigger  21000

I want to have textscan read the rows which have the values "92" and "19593", but to ignore the rows that are blank or the rows that have the words "type" "value" "latency". In addition, the documents I am scanning are of varying lengths, and I want textscan to automatically figure out which rows have the values of interest "92, 20, 14" and "19593" (latency values). How would I have textscan automatically scan the numerical values and ignore all other rows? In addition, I am not interested in scanning the column "value" at all. I only need to scan the two columns "type" and "latency".

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Second attempt: this time we will first convert the awful file format into a standard CSV format with one header line, no empty rows, no quoted numbers, and no repeated headers. I used regexprep and simply defined appropriate regular expressions:

fnm = 'events file.csv';
str = fileread(fnm);
rgx = {'\s*\n\s*"type"[a-z",]+','"(\d+)\s*"'};
rep = {'','$1'};
str = regexprep(str,rgx,rep);

You could also save str if you want an improved CSV file. Now we can easily extract the data from this improved CSV string:

fmt = '%f%*q%f%f%f';
opt = {'HeaderLines',1, 'CollectOutput',true, 'Delimiter',','};
C = textscan(str,fmt,opt{:});
M = C{1}

giving:

M =
        92       14287           0           1
        20       16459           0           2
        14       19147           0           3
        14       20646           0           4
        14       22047           0           5
        14       24431           0           6
        14       26844           0           7
        14       28819           0           8
        14       30071           0           9
        14       31843           0          10
        14       34788           0          11
        14       36883           0          12
        14       38439           0          13
        14       39571           0          14
        14       40691           0          15
        14       41368           0          16
        14       42443           0          17
        20       42708           0          18
        14       44955           0          19
        14       46092           0          20
        14       47771           0          21
        14       48632           0          22
        14       52780           0          23
        14       54312           0          24
        14       56616           0          25
        14       58724           0          26
        14       59831           0          27
        14       61911           0          28
        14       62859           0          29
        14       64884           0          30
        14       67534           0          31
        14       68367           0          32
        14       70052           0          33
        20       70311           0          34
        14       72450           0          35
        14       73476           0          36
        14       75143           0          37
        14       76615           0          38
        20       76622           0          39

Tested on this file: