Out of Memory using fgetl

I would like to read each line of a huge text file (.txt). The text file has 3 columns of floating point number like below (about 8 million such lines in text file)

-0.02500000 -0.02450000 -0.02400000

-0.02350000 -0.02300000 -0.02250000

-0.02200000 -0.02150000 -0.02100000

My objective is to read each line at a time. Hence, I thought of using fgetl. But I get an Out of memory error when fgetl is executed for the first time

fid=fopen('allnrncoords.txt','r');
tline=fgetl(fid);

It seems fgetl is trying to read the whole file when it should just read one line. Can someone explain me what could be an issue

[Walter Roberson]

Try using 'rt' instead of 'r' in the fopen()

Answer 1

[Sanket]

The problem was in the text file I was trying to read. The text file was written using %8.8f. When I changed it to %12.8f, fgetl ran fine.

Answer 2

[Kevin Holst]

Just throwing out ideas here, is your error coming at the first call to fgetl or after calling fopen?

Could it be that matlab is not recognizing an eol character in your text file and attempting to get the whole file as a line?

[Sanket]

error is coming at first call to fgetl. fopen works fine.

Yes, its a possibility that matlab is not recognizing eol. Do you have any work around?

[Kevin Holst]

If you know that each line will always consist of 3 numbers, you could do something like:

fid=fopen('allnrncoords.txt','r');

tline=textscan(fid,'%f %f %f',1);

That will get one line of data, so you could just do that as many times as you needed.

[Walter Roberson]

Opening with 'rt' should make end of line recognition better. Unless, that is, the file happens to have been written on Mac OS (before OS-X) using only CR without LF as the line breaks.