Importing text files below

Hi, I have trying to read the text file below where the first col is a string of different length, and it seem to be separated by a tab or something. Can anyone give some advice?

Thx

Symbol Description

1PG.AX 1-page Limited

AADKOA.AX Ardent Leisure Group

AAI.AX Alcoa Inc (USA CUFS)

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

textscan is going to be a robust and fast method to read this file:

fid = fopen('temp.txt','rt');
C = textscan(fid,'%s%[^\n]');
fclose(fid);

C{1} contains a cell array of the first column in the text file, C{2} contains all words after that. You could also use this to solve your earlier question in a much neater way:

http://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/180940-importing-text-files-like-above

The test text file is attached:

[Kin]

Thx

[Kin]

may I ask what does the {^\n} mean?

[Stephen23]

The textscan documentation explains the format string. Lets have a look:

'%s%[^\n]'

The first field is %s, which is defined as Read a string. This matches the first column of data.

The next field is %[^\n], which combines the following two features together:

• %[^...] is explained in the documentation as: Exclude characters inside the brackets, reading until the first matching character
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