Is it possible to decide which line is variable names in readtable?

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I want to use readtable to read data from an excel file. As I understand, in readtable, the first line is automatically the variable names. However, in my excel file, not just the first line, but the starting 3 lines contain characters and I want to know whether it is possible to use readtable to have an output where the vaiable names are the words that appear in the 3rd (or any desired) line.
A part of the excel file looks like this:
and I want the output to be like this:
ML125 MLCorr ML100 Ds
--------------------------------
32.2 32.2 48.44 15.2
...

Accepted Answer

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 24 Jun 2022
Yes, you can do that. For example,
variable_row = 3;
datatable = readtable(filename, 'VariableNamesRange', variable_row);
In some cases you want to specify a location to read the data from. You can use 'Range' in some cases, but if you have complicated headers then it might be better to use the 'DataRange' option.
Note: 'VariableNamesRange' and 'DataRange' may be specific to spreadsheets; the option names might be different for text files.
  2 Comments
Saeid
Saeid on 24 Jun 2022
Thanks Walter. When I try this, and although the said rows have different names, the output ends up looking like:
Var1 Var2 Var3
(or some strange number) and so on. I als tried setting 'VariableNamingRule' to 'preserve' but still turns out some strange variable name that is not what appears in the excel table

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More Answers (1)

Jeremy Hughes
Jeremy Hughes on 24 Jun 2022
You can try:
readtable(filename,"NumHeaderLines",2)
or
opts = detectImportOptions(filename)
opts.VariableNamesRange = "A3"
T = readtable(filename,opts)

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