Can regexprep be used for partial text replacements containing special characters?

I have a text file containing the following 3 lines of data:

"028 2016 10:11:12.12345"  39.028469  -104.484128  2070
"028 2016 10:11:13.1234"  39.028404  -104.484111  2075
"028 2016 10:11:14"  39.028390  -104.484000  2080

I am attempting to use regexprep to replace the time stamp portion (in quotations) with a single numerical value. If successful, the 3 lines of data would look like this:

1  39.028469  -104.484128  2070
2  39.028404  -104.484111  2075
3  39.028390  -104.484000  2080

I'm looking for a reference in the MATLAB documentation that would indicate how to account for the quotation marks, as well as all characters between them. This is my first attempt at using regexprep and I'm not even sure this is possible.

Is there a way to utilize regexprep for this instance?

Thank you.

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

v=importdata('file.txt')
a=regexprep(v,'\<".+"\>','')
b=regexp(a,'\S+','match')
n=numel(b);
out=[(1:n)' str2double(reshape([b{:}],n,[]))]

[Brad]

Had to make a small addition to the following;

out=[(1:n)' str2double(reshape([b{:}],n,[]))']

It works great and accounts for the special characters!!

Azzi, thanks for looking at this.

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

use sum function

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Another alternative is

v=importdata('fic.txt')
w=num2cell(1:numel(v))'
a=cellfun(@(x,y) regexprep(x,'\<".+"\>',num2str(y)),v,w,'un',0)