Fastest way to read in large mixed text file?

I have an ASCII file with 300000 lines with the following format:

01-01-1979T00:00:00  722816.000000  128.783100  0.027240  0.000000  2.212400  1.535800  290.701000  2.570600  0.941000

I would like to read the lines in as follows:

• Column 1 skip
• Column 2 read in as number (actually datenum times)
• Columns 3-10 read in as numbers

I can read this in using textscan thanks to code generated by the Matlab file import tool, but am wondering if there is a faster way.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

You can easily write your own textscan call:

fidi = fopen('filename.txt',rt');
data = textscan(fidi, ['%*s' repmat('%f',1,9)], 'CollectOutput'1);

See the documentation for textscan for other options and name-value pair arguments you may need to read your file.

NOTE — I do not have your file to test with it, so this is UNTESTED CODE.