How to ignore headers and select specific rows of Data to be improrted from text file.

Hi, I'm trying to do some post processing from openfoam with matlab but the data I want to import into matlab has headers also some numbers and strings mixed in between I just want to import the numeric values into a nx3 matrix. I'm able to do it interactively, but I need to import data programmatically because I have numerous data to import. I tried using texscan but I don't know where can I determine which rows I want to be imported in this command. is the textscan the only option to import such data and how?

Note: a sample of my data is shown below and the full data is attached.

Thank very much in advance for your help

 /*--------------------------------*- C++ -*----------------------------------*\
| =========                 |                                                 |
| \\      /  F ield         | OpenFOAM: The Open Source CFD Toolbox           |
|  \\    /   O peration     | Version:  5.x                                   |
|   \\  /    A nd           | Web:      www.OpenFOAM.org                      |
|    \\/     M anipulation  |                                                 |
\*---------------------------------------------------------------------------
FoamFile
{
    version     2.0;
    format      ascii;
    class       volVectorField;
    location    "3000";
    object      U;
}
// * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * //

    dimensions      [0 1 -1 0 0 0 0];
internalField   nonuniform List<vector> 
10000
(
(-6.27159e-06 6.10238e-06 0)
(-8.42477e-05 2.23045e-05 0)
(-0.000226515 3.24013e-05 0)
(-0.00040871 3.60096e-05 0)
(-0.00060764 3.67297e-05 0)
(-0.000812439 3.64566e-05 0)
(-0.00101913 3.61134e-05 0)
(-0.00122682 3.60697e-05 0)
(-0.00143574 3.6378e-05 0)
(-0.00164629 3.69498e-05 0)
(-0.00185851 3.76546e-05 0)
(-0.00207198 3.83631e-05 0)
boundaryField
{
    adiabaticWalls
    {
        type            fixedValue;
        value           uniform (0 0 0);
    }
(-0.000226515 3.24013e-05 0)
(-0.00040871 3.60096e-05 0)
(-0.00060764 3.67297e-05 0)
(-0.000812439 3.64566e-05 0)
(-0.00101913 3.61134e-05 0)
// ************************************************************************* //

[Roozbeh Saghatchi]

Dear Amir,

have you solved this problem?

Answer 1

[jonas]

You can try this (probably overly complicated) solution using regular expressions

%%Read file
str=fileread('File.txt');

%%Remove some annoying segments
str=regexprep(str,'(0 0 0)',' ');

%%Find data in brackets and remove brackets
n='(+|-)?\d+(\.\d+)?(e(+|-)?\d+)?';
str_out=regexp(str,['[(]',n,'\s',n,'\s',n,'[)]'],'match');
str_out=regexprep(str_out, '(', '')';
str_out=regexprep(str_out, ')', '');
num_out=cellfun(@str2num,str_out,'UniformOutput',false); 
num_out=cell2mat( num_out )

ans =

   1.0e-05 *

   -0.0001    0.0001         0
   -0.0011    0.0006         0
   -0.0054    0.0021         0
   -0.0156    0.0050         0
   -0.0306    0.0079         0
   -0.0473    0.0092         0
   -0.0626    0.0087         0
   -0.0894    0.0014         0