how to import numbers from a file

Hi all

i gave this text document named inventory.txt and it contais this data

part# cost quantity

127 23.44 146

643 18.20 87

443 143.19 13

801 15.34 66

I want to multiply the cost for each part by the quanatity and then add all costs to get total costs.I want to do this by extracting the costs and quantities and multiplying them. I tried using fget1(s), feof but i cant get them to work. any idea on how the extract the cost numbers and quanatity numbers?

[Geoff Hayes]

Tarek - try using importdata. Note how, if you use this function, you can ignore the header row. Out of curiosity, does your data look exactly like that with spaces between each row?

[darova]

Try importdata

Answer 1

[Divya Gaddipati]

You can use importdata for this purpose.

d = importdata('inventory.txt');

This outputs a struct with 3 fields - "data", "textdata" and "colheaders"

data contains the numerical data in a matrix

textdata contains the text in an array of cells

colheaders contains the column headers

cost = d.data(:, 2);
quantity = d.data(:,3);
total_cost = cost .* quantity;

Hope this helps!