Identify column headers in a text file

Dear all,

I am reading data from a text file with the standard format:

FILE TITLE        
Header-1  Header-2  Header-3  Header-4  Header-5
58.1          Inf          7.0000          0          0
59.1          Inf          7.0000          0          0
60.1          7.7090e+04  4.8870          1.297e-05  129.7
61.1          Inf          7.0000          0          0

In each file, there is one line for a file title, followed by a series of numerical data columns with a mixture of numerical formats (engineering, integer, inf etc.). Each data column has its own text header. The number of data columns is variable.

I would like to obtain each column header, preferably as a cell of strings, and then use strcmp() to confirm the identity of each column.

I have tried various methods such as textscan and fgetl. The closest I can get is a character array, but this does not distinguish individual column names:

fid = fopen('file.txt', 'r');
firstline = fgetl(fid);
secondline = fgetl(fid);

>> whos secondline
  Name      Size             Bytes  Class    Attributes

    l         1x104              208  char

Thanks in advance for the help!

Best regards,

Louis

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Louis - why not try using importdata? Look for the example where there is a text file with column headers, and you should be able to do something similar

 A = importdata('myFile.txt','\t',1);

The above assumes that all columns in your file are tab-delimited and that there is only one header row. A should be a structure with a field for the data and a field cell array of column headers.

[fsgeek]

Hi Geoff,

This works perfectly. I'm amazed I didn't see this sooner. Thanks very much!

Louis