Why doesn't 'HeaderLines' work in the readtable command?

Asked by njj1 on 31 Mar 2018

Latest activity Commented on by Brad Stiritz on 25 Apr 2019

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I am importing some excel files into Matlab using the readtable command. There are a couple of header lines in the file that I would like to skip, but when I use the name-value pair ('HeaderLines',2), I get an error:

Error using readtable (line 198)
Invalid parameter name: HeaderLines.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a way to get around this error?

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2 Answers

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Answer by Walter Roberson on 31 Mar 2018

Accepted Answer

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/readtable.html#namevaluepairarguments

"When reading:

Text files, only these parameter names apply: FileType, ReadVariableNames, ReadRowNames, TreatAsEmpty, DatetimeType, Delimiter, HeaderLines, Format, EmptyValue, MultipleDelimsAsOne, CollectOutput, CommentStyle, ExpChars, EndOfLine, DateLocale, and Encoding.
Spreadsheet files, only these parameter names apply: FileType, ReadVariableNames, ReadRowNames, TreatAsEmpty, DatetimeType, Sheet, Range, Basic, and TextType.
Text or Spreadsheet files with the opts import options, only these parameter names apply: ReadVariableNames, ReadRowNames, DateLocale, Encoding, Sheet, and Basic. "

You are reading a spreadsheet file. You need to use Range instead of HeaderLines

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Answer by Brad Stiritz on 21 Oct 2018

Edited by Brad Stiritz on 25 Apr 2019

Walter's solution is a good one, when the number of table rows are known in advance. In my case, I have Excel files with a fixed number of header rows, and variable number of data rows.

I reached out to tech support, and got the following solution. This works well for me, I hope it can help others also--

% Assume Excel file has 6 header rows
>>path_ = 'C:\data\my_file.xlsx';
>>ImportOptions_ = detectImportOptions(path_, 'NumHeaderLines', 6);
>>tb = readtable(path_,ImportOptions_);

(Edit: corrected minor bugs per Doug Bergman)

2 Comments

Doug Bergman on 25 Apr 2019

Brad, your solution worked well for me, once i realized that

path

is the full filename and not just the directory path, and

IOpts

is the same as

ImportOptions_

Thanks for posting, saved me a day of pulling my hair out.

Brad Stiritz on 25 Apr 2019

Hi Doug, thank you for your comment and correction notes. I'm glad you were able to save some time. Apologies for the sloppy code example, I have edited my post accordingly.

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