how to escape,reading line that starts with special character in a text file.

$hi jhon

$hey

$hello

hello

Answer 1

[kjetil87]

fid=fopen(filename);

if(fid<0);error('unable to open file');end

y=cell(500,1);%allocate some space, if you allocate less then the end
              %result it will take more time to read the file.
cntr = 1;
while (true)
    line = fgetl(fid);
    if(line==-1);break; end; %-1 indicates end of file...
    if(line(1)=='$')
        continue;
    end
    y{cntr} = line;
    cntr = cntr +1;
end

y=y(1:cntr-1);

fclose(fid);

Something like this maybe? I guess you could also read the entire file and then toss lines that starts with '$' , which in effect is what i am doing here aswell. But meh...

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

textscan() has CommentStyle that allows you to set a string that indicates that everything after the string is a comment. But that would affect more than just the first column.