Read textfile seperated by ':' and put it in a table

Hi,

I have some data which i would like to use in Matlab. the following file is an example:

    % test.txt
!Drawing Name: 1234567       Drawing File: 1234567_0
%Section 1: Header info
1234567:00:19/10/2015::::AB::::CD::::KL
%Section 2: data
1:2:3:4:5:6:7:8::::::::::::::::::::::::::900
%End of File Marker

I want to place this data into a table which makes a new column if ':' and makes a new row if 'CR LF' (enter). The data can always change in length, so section 1 can have 10 delimiters(':') and section 2 can have for example 30 delimiters(':'),

Can someone point me in the right direction or give me some example code? I've tried some functions, but without succes. So far the only function working for me is:

    % code
h = fileread('test.txt');

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

pdefesche

Answer 1

[TastyPastry]

Use strsplit() with the delimiter ':'. It doesn't care how many colons are in a row. All the data will be put into a cell array of strings, so you'll need to modify the data type using str2double() if you want to use it for calculations.

[pdefesche]

Thanks, this works perfectly for splitting the string into multiple cells. Only thing i'm missing is that it creates a new column when there is an actual enter(CR LF). I think it's because i'm using the function fileread() which doesnt know if there were any enters in the textfile.

Is there any other function i can use so new columns are created when seeing an enter?

[Guillaume]

fileread preserves the line returns when it reads a text file. What it does not do it line ending normalisation, so depending on the source of the file, the line ending is either going to be '\r\n' or '\n'. Nonetheless, you can still also use strsplit t separate the lines. You need to do that before the colon separation:

lines = strsplit(fileread('somefile.txt'), {'\r\n', '\n'});
%note the order of the split strings needs to be in that order
%to make sure '\r\n' takes precedence.
splitlines = cellfun(@(l) strsplit(l, ':'), lines, 'UniformOutput', false);

[pdefesche]

Thanks guillaume! Works, case solved :)

Answer 2

[pdefesche]

One more question:

is it possible to now visually show the data in a table? When i open the splitted data i see arrays of cells.

I've tried the following:

    % code
mtable = uitable(gcf,'Data',transposedsplitlines);

but returns following error:

Error using uitable Values within a cell array must be numeric, logical, or char