How do I read strings with textscan?

I have the following format I'm trying to read from a file with textscan:

10000 'name1 name2 name3 ..' 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

20000 'name4 name5 ..' 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

30000 'name6 name7 name8 name9 ..' 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

repeat format for 150 lines

The issue is I want everything between single quotes to be read/stored as one string. The problem is that there are whitespaces and also sometimes there are 3 names, sometimes there are 2, sometimes 4.

I've tried:

formatSpec = '%d %s %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f'

C = textscan(fid,formatSpec,150)

I know my formatSpec is too basic for strings with multiple whitespaces and words. Can you help with how I should read in this format? I basically want C to be an 150x11 cell matrix where column 2 is the entire string from single quote to single quote.

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The trick to this is to use a format item

''%[^'']''

for each place you want one of those quoted strings.

But there is a different approach: use fileread to read the entire file into a string, and then replace all ' in the string with " and then textscan the string with a %q format element. (That is, you can pass a string as the first parameter to textscan instead of a file identifier)

Answer 2

[C.J. Harris]

Have you tried specifying the delimiter?

formatSpec = '%d %s %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f';
C = textscan(fid,formatSpec,150, 'Delimiter', '''');

[kygreen]

Thanks! This was very helpful. I didn't get the delimiter syntax correct, and I also had the wrong N value so my results were awry. It is good now!