Importing text files into matlab in order to manipulate the data

Hi All,

I am very new to coding and so am having particular issues regarding importing text files to matlab so I can manipulate the data.

There are 113 text files each contain public information about a company in the following format

Sainsburys,18.810,78.920,99.001,5.808,41.202,56.078,18.004,75.000

the numbers represent certain characteristics. All the text files have eight numbers and the format is the same for them all.

I need to be able to create a table with all of the information together and then be able to analyse the data. My mine concern at the moment is importing all the data into one table that I can then work off.

Some of the coding I have used involved the use of 'dir' but the result of this is that it just tells me how many text files I have.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

http://matlab.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ#How_can_I_process_a_sequence_of_files.3F

For each file name that is found use

fid = fopen(CompleteFileName, 'rt');
datacell = textscan(fid, '%s%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f', 'Delimiter', ',');
fclose(fid);

Then datacell{1} would be a cell array of strings that held the first column, datacell{2} would be a numeric column vector holding the second column, and so on through datacell{9} holding the 8th numeric column.

Here CompleteFileName is the fully qualified file name you extracted by using dir() and fullfile

[Jamie Smith]

Thank you for your answer!

Im unsure what you mean by CompleteFileName, is that the m file I wrote that contains the dir() function? I did this and the cells contained NaN. Not sure how to proceed.

[Walter Roberson]

projectdirectory = 'C:\MyData\FlyingPigs';
dinfo = dir( fullfile(projectdirectory, '*.csv') );
for K = 1 : length(dinfo)
   thisfile = dinfo(K).name;
   CompleteFileName = fullfile(projectdirectory, thisfile);
   fid = fopen(CompleteFileName, 'rt');
   datacell = textscan(fid, '%s%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f', 'Delimiter', ',');
   fclose(fid);
   do something with the information in datacell at this point
 end

[Walter Roberson]

By the way, you would get NaN if your files have header lines. But you didn't mention any header lines...