MATLAB: Using textscan with csv – seemly basic but not working at all

textscan

Hi all,
This is embarrassingly simple but I've had no luck in succeeding in importing my basic csv file using textscan. I've tried several variations of the conversion but nothing is working.
Here's the first few rows of the file:
month  date  year  uavg  vavg  n  mavg  davg  usd  vsd  msd  dsd
6  1  2006  0.4464  -9.5247  6803  15.64  189.24  9.99  11.88  9.35  65.43
7  1  2006  3.1004  -3.0014  52332  15.3  175.55  12.72  11.54  8.92  89.82
8  1  2006  3.1502  -14.3924  49746  24.72  134.94  17.31  17.34  14.38  65.69
9  1  2006  -4.1448  -8.1912  46222  18.54  182.83  13.84  14.66  12.12  74.05
My attempts have all followed the examples and other codes I've written. There's this one:
fid = fopen('Baja_Border_J1_prep.csv');
data = textscan(fid,'%f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32 %f32', 'Headerlines', 1);
fclose(fid);
And this one:
data = textscan(fid,'%d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d', 'Headerlines', 1);
All I get as output is a cell array that is empty but no error messages that something is wrong.
Any guidance here would be great and much appreciated. I'm really perplexed that it's not working!
Thank you.

Best Answer

You forgot the 'Delimiter', ',' option.
Note: do not use %d format for fields that are floating point numbers. You could safely use %d for the year field.
I seldom use %f32, which would be for reading single precision. It is justified sometimes, but it does tend to lead to longer programs to mix singles and doubles in the proper manner. Unless I am short on memory I usually just use %f
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