MATLAB: Whitespace problem with textscan

Question

While using textscan, it doesn't seem to treat multiple whitespace as a single delimiter. The file has whitespace and tab delimeters,

    2012-10-15 K01  5.83  5.05  5.73  6.41  4.28
    2012-10-15 K01     5.25  5.80  6.41  4.28
    2012-10-15 K01              4.28

Using data = textscan(fd, form,'HeaderLines',2); so data{:,3} becomes

5.83, 5.25 and 4.28

but should be

5.83, NaN and NaN.

I've tried using the whitespace function but cannot get it to work

Answer 1

It does if you use the 'MultipleDelimsAsOne' option:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/textscan.html

This is explained in the section "Treat Repeated Delimiters as One".

Although, given your example output, you probably want to use the 'EmptyValue' option, which is explained in the section "Specify Delimiter and Empty Value Conversion".