importdata no recognizing column headers

I am using MATLAB 2012a on Windwos 7. I am trying to import a tab separated text file. The problem is that importdata does not recognize columnheaders if the length of the data is different from the length of the columnheaders. The program I am using is outputting an extra header eventhough I have no data for it. I can't change the output and there are about 100 columns. i want to be able to search for a specific column to get the right index to read only the relevant data. Here is a small example of the text file (spaces are tabs). so in this example, there are 4 headers, but only 3 columns of data. Matlab does not recognize the column headers and won't put them into columns.

header1 header2 header2 header4
1 2 3
2 3 2
3 4 5
1 2 3
3 4 5
2 4 5

any solutions out there? I don't want to go into each file to delete the extra columns (it does work but I have hundreds of these outputs). One solution would be to go into the text data and rewrite the columns that way. but I'm hoping there is an easier and faster method out there...

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Do you want to read the headers (all of them)

[hxh103]

yes, I would like to read all available headers

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

s=importdata('file.txt')
h=strsplit(s.textdata{:})
data=s.data
n=size(data,2)
out=[h(1:n);num2cell(data)]

[hxh103]

Hi, thanks for the quick response. I have Matlab 2012a which does not have strsplit as a default function. I have a strsplit function that I got online, but it does not have tabs as a delimiter.

Any other suggestions for splitting strings with tabs? I guess i could try to regexp for tabs with spaces and then use my strsplit. Seems a bit roundabout way to do it though.

EDIT: this works for me, forgot about the 'split' in regexp

h=regexp(s.texdata{:},'\t','split')

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

h=regexp(s.textdata,'\S+','match');
h=h{:}

[hxh103]

Sorry, I forgot to mention there are other text above the column headers. so the above code won't work as it doesn't give the correct headers. The following code works for me

s=importdata('file.txt')
t=s.textdata{end,1}; %assumes your header is in the last row
h=regexp(t,'\t','split')

h= 'header1' 'header2' 'header3' 'header4'

Cheers, hope this helps someone else out in similar situation.