Why does MATLAB do this, wrt fscanf from txt document?

I imported a .txt document using fopen and fscanf, and used the following two lines:

 fid = fopen('History2.txt');
 words = fscanf(fid, '%s');
 words
 if true
    % code
  end

OUTPUT : words =

Hello,thistellsusthehistoryofvariousrulersintheCholaperiod.Historyisimportantbecauseittellsuswhatnottodointhefuture.That'swhyhistoryisthebestthingtodo,whenhistoryisthere,wefeelsafeandsound.

When I did this instead, fid = fopen('History2.txt'); words = fscanf(fid, '%c'); words if true % code end

OUTPUT : words =

Hello, this tells us the history of various rulers in the Chola period. History is important because it tells us what not to do in the future. That's why history is the best thing to do, when history is there, we feel safe and sound.

Any idea why just changing it from fscanf using %s to %c retained the whitespaces?

Answer 1

[Jan]

The '%c' format specifier let FSCANF import all characters, even spaces, while '%s' imports words, which are separated by white-space characters. So you observe the expected behavior.