Header seperation and column matching

I have made a program which imports text data with dates and headers turns it into a matrix and plots using the date column as X axis and selectively each other data column for Y axis. The problem is that the header line appears to be as one string. How do I seperate it into many strings and how can I use them to automatically match each corresponding data column name? For example if one of the strings is "radiation" , when I type radiation the radiation data column should view.

Answer 1

[John Petersen]

Suppose your file has a header like

radiation, temperature, voltage
data....

Then your program would get the header with

fid = fopen(yourfile);
currentline = fgetl(fid);  % gets the first line of the file
col = 0;
nextind = 1;
while (currentline >0)
   col = col + 1;
   [parm{col}, count, errmsg, nextind] = sscanf(currentline(nextind:end),'%s,');
end

parm is a cell array that contains all your header parameters.