Reading data from file with breaks
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I'm trying to read values from some very large files and store them as a matrix. The issues is as well as having headers at the top, there are also headers repeated every 10k lines or so. For example
header 1, header 2, header 3;
1 2 3;
%(9998 rows of numbers)
4 5 6;
header 1, header 2, header 3;
7 8 9
dlmread doesn't work, and I've tried textscan and fread, which both sort of do what I want but not quite. Thanks in advance.
2 Comments
Answers (1)
Star Strider
on 21 May 2015
The textscan function will work, but you have to use fseek to restart it each time it hits the interim text line every 10K or so lines.
This is an archived code snippet to illustrate the technique:
fidi = fopen('S21.txt');
D1 = textscan(fidi, '%f %f', 'HeaderLines',2, 'Delimiter','\n', 'CollectOutput',1);
D1{:}([1:5 end-4:end],:) % Diagnostic Look
fseek(fidi,0,0); % Position Start Of Second Part Of File
D2 = textscan(fidi, '%f %f', 'HeaderLines',2, 'Delimiter','\n', 'CollectOutput',1);
D2{:}([1:5 end-4:end],:) % Diagnostic Look
The ‘Diagnostic Look’ lines verify that the file is importing correctly. They are not important for the code and you can delete them.
6 Comments
Star Strider
on 22 May 2015
The ‘D1’ and ‘D3’ lines are there only to verify that the code is reading the file correctly. They display the first 5 and last 5 lines in each segment to be sure they were imported correctly. They are otherwise not part of the actual code, so you can delete them.
When I run the code I posted, then add these two lines:
SizeD1 = size(D{1}{1})
SizeD2 = size(D{2}{1})
I get:
SizeD1 =
200 3
SizeD2 =
335 3
I didn’t count the lines manually, but it seems to be working as it should, at least with the file you provided.
While I’m thinking about it, this is the way to concatenate them if you want to:
Dcat = [D{1}{1}; D{2}{1}];
producing a (535x3) double array with the file you provided.
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