Parsing, Separating, Adding/Mult Integers.

Hello. I am trying to write a MATLAB program to replace what would be some rather complex and repetitive awk commands when using Terminal. I am already decent at programming, but have very little experience with MATLAB and it's syntax.

I have multiple lines of text in a .txt document that read something like the following

12MARCH,2011 123456789 That should be output as: 12 3 2011 56877

First I want to separate them out to read: 12 MARCH 2011 123 456 789 Then replace all the months with their corresponding numbers (Jan = 1, Feb = 2, etc). I'm pretty sure I can do this though, once I have column with "MARCH" assigned as a variable I can do something along the lines of

if strcmp(month,"MARCH") month = 3

Last, I want to perform some mathematical operations on the last columns (I was planning on assigning the columns variable names using textread and working from there). This would be something like seperating 123456789 to 123 456 789, and then doing (123)*(456)+789

to get a final output text file of

12 3 2011 56877

So. I already know how to the MATLAB to read a text file, and separate out existing columns as different variables, but how do I separate out strings into multiple columns (12MARCH,2011 -> 12 MARCH 2011), and then, in the case of integers, have it split up a string as separate integers, not strings, so that so that I can later add/multiply them.