Need help with textscan

Hello,

I've been struggling with textscan for some time now, if anyone could point me in the right direction here I'd be eternally grateful.

I have a text file with data in the following format:

Eu3+ 1

     10.06037350        -4.673610300        -1.834337367    
   1.22604929765      -2.02696902730      0.734136756877    
   10517.3113705      -9795.46057045      -2441.96899290

... and this is repeated (1510 times, to be precise)

What I am trying to achieve (for the time being), is simply to extract the first 5 entries and define as a vector, so in this instance I would simply want something like

C = [ Eu3+ 1 10.06 -4.67 -1.83]

and then the following 6 entries can be discarded.

I have tried multiple variants of ideas, along the lines of:

C = textscan(fid,'%s%d8%f32%f32%f32');

But I am continually failing to produce the vector mentioned above.

Please, Matlab community, can you help me?

Kind regards,

Tom

Answer 1

[David Sanchez]

Your are mixing strings with doubles. Try this out. You'll end up with a cell array containing the heading and the first three doubles.

fid = fopen('test.txt','r');
% read as single cell
C = textscan(fid,'%s ');
fclose(fid);
C = C{1,1}(1:4)

C = 

    'Eu3+1'
    '10.06037350'
    '-4.673610300'
    '-1.834337367'

[Tom]

David, I think that's the ticket! Thanks so much!

Would you mind clarifying a few things for me.

What is the necessity of the 'r' in fopen?

How come the textscan is happy with the different entry types despite defining them only with '%s'?

What does the line C = C{1,1}(1:4) achieve? Is this simply placing the results in a vector of the relevent dimensions?

Again, thankyou!

Tom