How to import data from a csv that contains strings numbers and blank cells

I have a csv that contains a single column with a lot of data in it. The data is a variety of strings, numbers and blanks, where I want to keep it in the exact order including all of the blank cells. So an example of the data would be:

A

05

G

12

I have tried to use importdata and this works perfectly, the problem is my csv has over 1 million rows and for some reason using importdata only imports to just over the first 100k rows.

Any help would be appreciated!

[Roberto Herrera-Lara]

do you have any error? or message?

[Roberto Herrera-Lara]

how much ram do you have?

[R2]

I do not get any kind of message or erros and have 8 GB of ram

[Philip Caplan]

Have you tried using "csvread" to import the entire column? For some examples, please see:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/csvread.html

[R2]

csvread does not work as it only accepts numerical values, as I have text in the column as well as numbers I get an error message.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

I would experiment with textscan.

Example:

fidi = fopen('filename.csv');
D = textscan(fidi, '%s', 'Delimiter',',');
fclose(fidi);

This should read everything in as a cell array of strings. (I don’t have your file, so this is just a guess on my part. I will leave it to you to experiment.) You may need other arguments in the textscan call (such as 'EndOfLine'), but it may work as described here without any changes.

[R2]

I changed the delimiter to \n to include all of the blank spaces, but otherwise this worked! Thanks for your help!

[Star Strider]

My pleasure!

Answer 2

[Roberto Herrera-Lara]

100k rows, and if you do the same process several times(10 times) and then you concatenate the matrixs, i dont know, perhaps works!! =) Divide and conquer algorithm