Load textfile into Matlab

Hello,

I have the following textfile (see figure).

The first line says 'eating'. The second line is the time when eating occured. The time is given like 00:00:00.001, in hours:minutes:seconds(also with decimals).

I've been looking for some scripts to load this into Matlab, but I can't seem to find an answer that doesn't give me NaN or zeroes...

Thanks!

[Stephan]

please attach an example file

[Stephen23]

@Sam: please upload a sample file by clicking the paperclip button.

textscan could probably do this, without parsing each line separately or importing the file as text first. But we need a sample file to work with!

[Rik]

It is probably the best to load the entire file as text and then parse the activity lines separately from the timestamps.

What code have you tried?

[Sam]

I have tried this code

filename = 'DAY12_153521_160521_1_20S_kip5.txt';
[A,delimiterOut]=importdata(filename)

But this gives NaN values. What do you mean by parse the activity lines seperately from the timestamps? There are already 2 different lines for these two?

Thanks for the quick answers.

[Rik]

You need to read the file as a text file. To do this, you can use several functions. One of the functions you could use is my readfile function. The benefit of that function in this case is that it already returns your file as a cell array (one cell per line). This makes it trivial to separate the activity from the time:

filename = 'DAY12_153521_160521_1_20S_kip5.txt';
data = readfile(filename);

%use a step size of 3 to account for the empty lines
activities=data(1:3:end);
timeinfo=data(2:3:end);

Now you have a cell array for both, so you can parse them separately.