how to search and delete the nth ocurance of a text in a text file

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Hallo,
I have a text file 'test.txt' . The contents of test file is as follows.
Tim is Home
John is happy
Sara is funny
Kevin is at work
John is happy
Cat and Dog
I want to open the test.txt file and delete the 'nth' occurance of 'John is happy '. I have attached the text file too. Thanks in advance.
eg. I want to delete the line with ' n th 'occurance.
so It can be 1st occurance
or 2nd Occurance.. etc
Regards,
Jaffrey

Accepted Answer

madhan ravi
madhan ravi on 17 Jul 2019
s = fileread('test.txt');
v = regexp(s,'\n','split');
z = regexprep(s,'John is happy','',2) % 2 denotes the nth occurence
dlmwrite('sample.txt',z,'delimiter','')
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More Answers (2)

Adam Danz
Adam Danz on 17 Jul 2019
Edited: Adam Danz on 17 Jul 2019
The question is unclear whether the goal is to remove the 2nd line of text or to remove the line(s) with "John is happy". The block below shows both interpretations.
% Import text
opts = delimitedTextImportOptions("NumVariables", 1);
opts.VariableNames = "txt";
test = readtable("C:\Users\adanz\Documents\MATLAB\savehere\matlabCentralDocs_trash\test.txt", opts);
test = table2array(test);
% Delete 2nd line
test(2) = [];
% - OR -
% Delete lines that match "John is happy"
idx = strcmpi(test, 'John is happy');
test(idx) = [];
% - OR -
% delete nth occurance of "John is happy"
n = 2;
idx = strcmpi(test, 'John is happy');
test(max(find(idx,n))) = [];
% Write to txt file
fid = fopen('test2.txt','wt');
fprintf(fid,'%s\n',test{:});
fclose(fid);
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Jaffrey Hudson Immanuel Jeyakumar
Thank you. It is working now.

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R2015b

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