string formatting - Matlab textscan introducing additional rows with zeros or NaNs -

i'm trying read .dat file containing tens of thousands of rows, each of them looks like:

   1.9681968    0   0   19.996  0   61  100 1.94e-07    6.62e-07      2.330233     0   0   19.996  0   61  100 1.94e-07    6.62e-07    2.6512651    0   0   19.997  0   61  100 1.94e-07    6.62e-07    3.5923592    0   0   19.998  0   61  100 1.96e-07    6.62e-07 

now example, i'm trying read with

    data = textscan(fid, %.9f%*f%*f%.9f%*f%*f%*f%.9f) 

where string format depends on column want read.

when reading big files, first column of cell array 'data' become

    1.96819680000000     0     2.33023300000000     2.65126510000000     0     3.59235920000000     0 

and rest of columns show nans instead of zeros. additional rows many rows in data file, arrays factor 2 larger.

i guess has errors when reading doubles, since this problem doesn't occur if try read file strings.

but if possible, not read strings , have convert doubles.

any ideas?

i think issue format string. try format string shown below.

fid = fopen('test.txt');  % data = textscan(fid, '%.9f%*f%*f%.9f%*f%*f%*f%.9f') data = textscan(fid, '%f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f'); data = cell2mat(data) fclose(fid); 

where test.txt text file containing given example data. above code gives following output.

1.9682         0         0   19.9960         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000       nan 2.3302         0         0   19.9960         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000    0.0000 2.6513         0         0   19.9970         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000    0.0000 3.5924         0         0   19.9980         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000    0.0000 

notice nan value when text contained 8 values. if want specify default value when lines contain less values use emptyvalue setting:

data = textscan(fid, '%f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f','emptyvalue', 42); 

then get:

1.9682         0         0   19.9960         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000   42.0000 2.3302         0         0   19.9960         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000    0.0000 2.6513         0         0   19.9970         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000    0.0000 3.5924         0         0   19.9980         0   61.0000  100.0000    0.0000    0.0000 

you can first column indexing resulting matrix data(:,1) outputs following:

1.9682 2.3302 2.6513 3.5924