Loading data which is a triangular array.

Hello.

I have a data file which consists of a triangle of numbers and I would like to be able to manipulate the file in Matlab, but since it is not a matrix I cannot get the file to load.

I am happy to 'embed' the data in a square matrix (with 0s in the previously empty places), but I do not want to edit the data file itself (thousands of rows), so would have to append these 0s through Matlab itself. Is there a simple solution for getting the data into a matrix? Or another way of accessing the data?

Thank you.

[Teja Muppirala]

Is this a plain text file? Binary? Some special format?

When you say it consists of a triangle of numbers, does it look like this:

1

1 1

1 2 1

1 3 3 1

Or something else?

It's hard to answer this question without this sort of information.

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

One method you may be able to use is to first load into a cell array, then convert the cell array into a numeric one.

Also, different command are better than others for reading certain types of data from files. I have found the "readtext" command from the file exchange to be very robust:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/10946

This is not to be confused with the "textread" command.