textread formatting help

I have an ascii file which contains hourly sea level data in the following format:

siteid Year Month Day Hour Level Level Level Level... etc.

cn 1965 1 1 0000-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999-9999

Where the hour is either 1200 or 0000, and the following values are the hourly tidal level for the 12 hour period. I'm having trouble extracting the data as there are no delimiters, but the values are restrained to their own columns.

Example, for the 11th of december 1969. There is no delimiters between year, month and day.

cn 19691211 0000 170 410 720 960 1020 1050 990 870 810 810 840 1020

Is there a way to set the format so matlab reads the value that is present in a certain column range? Like columns 8:11 which represent year. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

[per isakson]

Do you know the exact format, i.e. the length of each field? I assume you do!

Read the full line as a string

buf = textscan( fid, '%s', 'delimiter', sprintf( '\n' ) );

next extract the columns

col1 = buf{ :, ix1:ix2 };

something like this. I leave the exact handling of the cell array. And last convert to numeric.

- per

[Leigh]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Did the job :)