Why do I receive an error when reading my file with the CSVREAD or DLMREAD functions from MATLAB?

Why do I receive an error when reading my file with the CSVREAD or DLMREAD functions from MATLAB?

The CSVREAD and DLMREAD functions seems to ignore the column specification when reading in a file. I get errors when trying to read a non-numeric entry in column 1, even when I've specified to begin reading from column 2 (zero-based numbers). My file is as follows:

 row1,row2,row3,row4,row5
 col1,1,2,3,4
 col1,5,6,7,8
 col1,9,10,11,12
 col1,13,14,15,16

The command I use is:

d = csvread('csvReadTest.csv',1,1)

Here is the error:

ERROR: ??? Trouble reading number from file (row 1, field 1) ==> col1,1,2,3,4\n

Error in ==> C:\MATLABR12\toolbox\matlab\iofun\dataread.dll
Error in ==> C:\MATLABR12\toolbox\matlab\iofun\textread.m
On line 159  ==> [varargout{1:nlhs}]=dataread('file',varargin{:});

Error in ==> C:\MATLABR12\toolbox\matlab\iofun\dlmread.m
On line 102  ==>     result  = textread(filename,'',nrows,'delimiter',delimiter,'whitespace',whitespace, ...

Error in ==> C:\MATLABR12\toolbox\matlab\iofun\csvread.m
On line 45  ==>     m=dlmread(filename, ',', r, c);

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This bug has been fixed in MATLAB 6.1 (R12.1).

As a workaround, please consider pre-editing your data file to remove the first column of text. Alternatively, you can use TEXTREAD to read your file.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/textread.html

For example, consider the following file named 'test.txt':

 row1,row2,row3,row4,row5
 col1,1,2,3,4
 col1,5,6,7,8
 col1,9,10,11,12
 col1,13,14,15,16

The following code will read the data into the variable 'x':

[x(:,1) x(:,2) x(:,3) x(:,4)] = textread('test.txt','%*s %d %d %d %d','delimiter',',','headerlines',1)