how to use textscan in matlab

Question

i'm trying to inesrt the following text file into a matrix in matlab

I tried to use 'textscan'

fileID = fopen('Uz10.txt');

Uz10=textscan(fileID,'%d');

fclose(fileID);

but alwayes got,

Undefined operator '*' for input arguments of type 'cell'.

can anybody gives me the right format?

il_raffa il_raffa · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-24T14:35:04

You can modify you code this way:

1) by specifying %s as the format: in this case, textscan returns a cellarray of string

fileID = fopen('Uz10.txt');
% Uz10=textscan(fileID,'%d:%d');
Uz10=textscan(fileID,'%s');
fclose(fileID);

Output:

>> Uz10{1}

ans = 

    '0:00'
    '0:10'
    '0:20'
    '0:30'
     ...

2) by specifying %d:%d as the format: in this case, textscan returns a (1x2) cellarray of int32 type containing the two digit of each row. Then you can concatenate them in order have a (nx2) matrix

fileID = fopen('Uz10.txt');
Uz10=textscan(fileID,'%d:%d');
% Uz10=textscan(fileID,'%s');
fclose(fileID);

t=[Uz10{1} Uz10{2}]

Output:

>> t=[Uz10{1} Uz10{2}]

t =

           0           0
           0          10
           0          20
           0          30
           ...        ...

If you want to manage the data as time data you can use the function datetime.

For example (using the first of the above format to read the input file):

datetime(Uz10{1},'InputFormat','m:ss')

Output:

>> datetime(Uz10{1},'InputFormat','m:ss')

ans = 

   24-Sep-2017 00:00:00
   24-Sep-2017 00:00:10
   24-Sep-2017 00:00:20
   24-Sep-2017 00:00:30
   ...

how to use textscan in matlab

1 Answers