Out of memory - opening a big file

I have to open a very big file (220mega) and i used "textscan", but after a few minutes it returns "Out of memory. Type HELP MEMORY for your options.

Is it possibile to solve this memory problem?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

[Nirmal Gunaseelan]

The tech note provides some general guidelines for handling out of memory errors.

In your case, I'd suggest reading data in pieces. For example,

C = textscan(fid, 'format', N)

can be run many times with the same FID and all the C's can be eventually combined. Some examples are the TEXTSCAN doc.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

220 megabytes is not very much, and should only cause a problem if you are representing the data in larger datatype than it needs. For example, if you are reading a 1 or 2 digit number, then you would be better using a format specifier that instructs textscan to store as int8 or uint8. Reading a whole string of 10010101<etc> and telling textscan to store each character as a double precision number would use a lot of storage.