Textscan for comma seperated file with mixed format

I am trying to use the textscan function with a text file where the delimiter is a comma(,). I load the text file using:

f=fread(fid,'*char')';

Which gives me a variable f that looks like:

f = '2020-01-20 00:00:00,1,2,4,5,Not Connected,,,NaN,10,5';

The variable f contains strings and numeric data but I only want to use the numeric data. The format can change between measurements and the data does have multiple lines which I am not able to recreate now in the example.

Using code: textscan(f,'%f',11,'delimiter',',') will not give me an output as expected. I would expect a 11 by x cell array with only floating numbers or else a NaN.

How can I get this code to work?

Answer 1

[Bob Thompson]

Have you tried using readtable? It has a delimited text option, and tends to be a bit better about handling different types of data.

f = readtable(fid,'Filetype','delimitedtext','Delimiter',',');

This is untested, because I don't have access to a sample file for you, but it should be something of that form.

[Thijs Van de Wiel]

Yes I have tried that, unfortuanetly it did take quite a lot of time to compute that for a large data set. Therefore I preferred using textscan since if the data set would be all floating numbers this method is the fastest.