help with reading txt file into matlab

hi folks,

I have a very large txt file that I want to read into Matlab. When I use the "import data" option it reads the file just fine, but when using "import selection", it gives me a single filed with "NaN". I've tried exporting as a function, live script and script as well but it gives the same results.

Can anyone help me with this please?

opts = delimitedTextImportOptions("NumVariables", 6, "Encoding", "UTF16-LE");

% Specify range and delimiter
opts.DataLines = [48, 48];
opts.Delimiter = "\t";

% Specify column names and types
opts.VariableNames = ["CLOSED", "Var2", "Var3", "Var4", "Var5", "Var6"];
opts.SelectedVariableNames = "CLOSED";
opts.VariableTypes = ["double", "string", "string", "string", "string", "string"];

% Specify file level properties
opts.ExtraColumnsRule = "ignore";
opts.EmptyLineRule = "read";

% Specify variable properties
opts = setvaropts(opts, ["Var2", "Var3", "Var4", "Var5", "Var6"], "WhitespaceRule", "preserve");
opts = setvaropts(opts, ["Var2", "Var3", "Var4", "Var5", "Var6"], "EmptyFieldRule", "auto");

% Import the data
T = readtable(pathVar, opts);

[Ive J]

what happens if you directly read it with readtable?

data = readtable('myfile.txt', 'NumHeaderLines', 0) % force readtable to treat first line as header

[Teshan Rezel]

@Ive J that works, thank you! please can you post this as an answer so I can accept it?

[Ive J]

My pleasure, but I guess you should accept @dpb answer, it's more detailed and informative also for future questions.

Answer 1

[dpb]

Be far easier if you attached a representative piece of the file, but...

The above is the wrong way to go about creating in import options object generally -- it's possible to manage to set the needed parameters individually this way, but highly error-prone besides being a lot of effort.

Observations on the above--

1. opts.DataLines = [48, 48]; % this says there's only one line of data in the file to be read; clearly strongly at odds with the prior description of a "very large" file.
2. opts.SelectedVariableNames = "CLOSED"; % then this says to read only one of the six variables and ignore the others

The combination of those would not be terribly surprising doesn't work as expected.

As @Ive J suggests, the first thing to do is just use readtable without any options and see if the file is regular-enough for it to successfully read on its own -- that importdata was successful strongly implies you won't need any special treatment at all. I would note that his comment is backwards to the input of 'NumHeaderLines',0 as this tells readtable the first record in the file is data. That was undoubtedly just a typo, intending 'NumHeaderLines',1 instead.

But, that also isn't consistent with your explicit use of 48 in 1. above that would imply quite a large header section at the beginning of the file. Again, without the file, we simply can't tell.

If you have a release of R2019b or later, then readtable on its own does all the input scanning that detectImportOptions does; only if you have an earlier release or there is still something not recognized correctly after that should there be any need at all.