Problem with Textscan, CSV file and "blank" char

Hi!

I have to read a large .csv file. I usually work with .dat files, so I'm a bit lost. The file contains dates and numbers in the following way:

4,28/11/2011 11:38:27:621,114.73137,301.64963,81.850418,835.99581,395.05321,229.46274
5,28/11/2011 11:39:27:621,114.96312,298.70543,81.948063,837.02882,395.99334,229.92624

I don't know if it is relevant, but each complete row is in one Excel cell; so when I open the .csv file in Excel, it only has one column and multiple rows.

As you can see, the delimiter is the comma ','.

The file has 15 headlines.

I tried the following:

Scan=textscan(fileID,'%f %q %f %f %f %f %f %f','Delimiter',',','Headerlines',15);

But MATLAB creates an empty 1x8 cell. It seems MATLAB can't read the numbers like numbers (%f), because if I try this:

Scan=textscan(fileID,'%q','Delimiter',',','Headerlines',15);

MATLAB returns a 1x1 cell with contains a large 32609x1 cell. This last cell, with the example data, would be like this:

' 4 '
' 1 9 / 1 1 / 2 0 1 1   1 2 : 4 5 : 3 7 : 7 0 4 '
' 1 2 0 . 2 6 1 3 2 '
' 1 4 5 . 8 1 4 5 1 '
' 1 4 0 . 3 9 8 0 5 '
' 3 4 8 . 2 8 6 0 6 '
' 3 1 6 . 9 5 8 5 4 '
' 2 4 0 . 5 2 2 6 4 '
' 5 '
' 1 9 / 1 1 / 2 0 1 1   1 2 : 4 6 : 3 7 : 7 0 4 '
' 1 3 7 . 0 6 4 9 2 '
' 1 5 7 . 2 3 3 5 8 '
' 1 5 4 . 4 4 1 1 6 '
' 5 2 7 . 5 2 4 7 6 '
...

Why MATLAB only reads the numbers as a string? Why creates a new row when it find a comma? Why inserts a 'blank' whitespace before and after every char? This blank whitespace is not a whitespace, I verified it with isspace(), so I don't know how to delete it from the string...

So, please, how can I read correctly this .csv file?

Thanks in advance!

[Walter Roberson]

Is it possible that the file is UTF-16 encoded?

[Álvaro Peñalva]

That's it! The file was UTF-16 encoded. I encoded it in ANSI and textscan works perfectly!

Huge thanks!!