Finding titles in a notepad file

Hello everyone,

I have a large notepad file and I want to be able to type in a fault and find that fault in the file and display the time that it occured for every one of those faults.

This is a segment of data from the file:

I want to be able to type in RADAR_FAULT and find all radar faults and display the time of each one in a column of data labeled "time"

10/13/2010 - 11:13:53.03456 - RADAR_FAULT

10/13/2010 - 11:13:53.78990 - COMPUTER_INITIALIZED

10/13/2010 - 11:13:54.43567 - SONAR_FAULT

10/13/2010 - 11:13:55.19587 - TEMPERATURE_MEASUREMENT

10/13/2010 - 11:13:56.09851 - TEMPERATURE_MEASUREMENT

The end result would be a column of data labeled time (for example)

Time: 10/13/2010 - 11:13:53 10/13/2010 - 11:15:23 10/13/2010 - 11:27:46 10/13/2010 - 12:02:49 etc.

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

Import with textscan and use strcmpi

fid  = fopen('test.txt');
out  = textscan(fid,'%27s - %s','Delimiter','','CollectOutput',1);
fid  = fclose(fid);
out{1}(strcmpi('RADAR_FAULT',out{1}(:,2)),1);

[Fish]

I used this code for the exact data that I posted on the site but I was unable to get into the lab to actually test the code on teh actual text files. The code returned only a 1X1 cell.

I am going to post the exact data because apparently the data is slightly off from what i posted therefore rendering the code insufficient for the real data.

Here it is:

The top of the file (there are multiple ones of this type of text data) has 17 lines of text/numeric data telling how many of each type of error are in the file.

Then it says about 100 lines with the dates like so:

10/13/2010 - 11:13:53.034567 - error_name #### Description

The spaces in between the error_name and the #### and the Description are tab spaces (not space bared over)

Then it says a line of data about the time zone that the times are in

then it has

10/13/2010 - 11:13:53.03456 - RADAR_FAULT

line of data

line of data

line of data

10/13/2010 - 11:13:53.78990 - COMPUTER_INITIALIZED

10/13/2010 - 11:13:53.78990 - COMPUTER_DOWN

10/13/2010 - 11:13:53.78990 - COMPUTER_INITIALIZED

line of data

line of data

line of data

line of data

line of data

line of data

10/13/2010 - 11:13:54.43567 - SONAR_FAULT

10/13/2010 - 11:13:55.19587 - TEMPERATURE_MEASUREMENT

10/13/2010 - 11:13:56.09851 - TEMPERATURE_MEASUREMENT

line of data

line of data

The point is once the text file gets to the information where it displays the time of the RADAR_FAULT, it is not always set up the same way. The text lines are variable like shown above.

The end result should just be a column that lists the time of each RADAR_FAULT.

[Fish]

After the line with the time and the error name the "lines of data" below it are spaced in two space bars. (I don't know why I wasn't able to type that when I was trying to explain this problem).

[Fish]

After the line with the time and the error name the "lines of data" below it are spaced in two space bars. (I don't know why I wasn't able to type that when I was trying to explain this problem).

[Fish]

After the line with the time and the error name the "lines of data" below it are spaced in two space bars. (I don't know why I wasn't able to type that when I was trying to explain this problem).

[Fish]

sorry my computer froze

[Oleg Komarov]

So, what are you interested in? Only in the lines which begin with a date?

[Fish]

yes and only those that have the error code: RADAR_FAULT next to them