Problem in importing textfiles

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afrya
afrya on 9 Jan 2015
Commented: afrya on 12 Jan 2015
Hello,
I would like to import a textfile with matlab. The textfile consist of decimal numbers. It looks like:
X Y Z
0,1 0,2 0,3
0,4 0,5 0,6
0,7 0,8 0,9
I use the following code to import the data:
filename = 'Textfile-test.txt';
delimiterIn = ' ';
headerlinesIn = 1;
A = importdata(filename,delimiterIn,headerlinesIn);
My problem is that the numbers are not imported by matlab. Do you have any idea how to solve this problem.
Thank you in advance

Accepted Answer

Stephen23
Stephen23 on 11 Jan 2015
MATLAB only recognizes the period character as the decimal radix, so you will need to change that comma character before converting to numeric. To achieve this when reading the file with MATLAB, you could do something like this:
fid = fopen('temp.txt');
C = textscan(fid, '%s%s%s');
fclose(fid);
C = [C{:}];
hdr = C(1,:);
dat = regexprep(C(2:end,:),',','.');
dat = cellfun(@(s)sscanf(s,'%f'),dat);

More Answers (1)

dpb
dpb on 9 Jan 2015
What error(s), if any did you get?
With that file structure, simply
x=importdata(filename);
should work altho don't see anything obviously wrong with the specific form.
Have you ensured the file is actually on the Matlab search path and the filename is spelled correctly, etc., etc, etc., ...?
  3 Comments
dpb
dpb on 11 Jan 2015
...the decimal limiter is the comma...
Woops, my old eyes whiffed on that, sorry. AFAIK, that's not a changeable option, you either have to change the file format itself or read the data and do a translation in memory before scanning the data.
It's a pain in the proverbial appendage for those locales where the convention is the other way 'round, I know...
afrya
afrya on 12 Jan 2015
Edited: afrya on 12 Jan 2015
Ok thank you for your help

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