MATLAB: Does DLMREAD in MATLAB fail to properly separate the data into columns when I specify a space delimiter for a tab delimited ASCII file

Question

I have an ASCII file, test.txt, that uses a tab delimiter to separate multiple columns of data. When I use the DLMREAD as follows:

tmpMatrix = dlmread('test.txt',' ');

all of my columns are combined into one single column (the number of rows is preserved).

Answer 1

It is incorrect to use a space delimiter to separate tab delimited data.

Use '\t' to specify a tab as the delimiter.

For example:

tmpMatrix = dlmread('test.txt','\t');