Problem with dlmread reading data

Dear Mathworks community,

I am having a problem using the dlmread function. I want to read data from a GNU zipped file (gravitational data from the GRACE satellite) into MATLAB so I can work with it. This is my approach so far:

MyFolderInfo = dir('C:\Users\my\Desktop\Skole\6. Semester\Bachelor_Projekt\GRACE')
listing = MyFolderInfo(4).name
M = dlmread(listing,' ', [8, 0, 5150, 9])

So I am succesfully loading the data from dir, but when I want to use the dlmread function I get the following error:

*Error using dlmread (line 147)
Mismatch between file and format character vector.
Trouble reading 'Numeric' field from file (row number 1, field number 1) ==> GRCOF2    0    0 0.883194575888E-11
0.000000000000E+00 0.0000E+00 0.0000E+00 20020405.0000 20020501.0000 nnnn                       \n*

I want to use only the numerical data and exclude the columns "GRCOF2" and "nnnn", but when I try to make the row and column offset, like below, i just get the following error.

M = dlmread(listing,' ', [8, 1, 5150, 8])
Trouble reading 'Numeric' field from file (row number 1, field number 16) ==> nnnn                       \n

Its almost as it doesn't register my max. column offset correctly. Can anyone help me?

Best Regards Jonathan

PS. I've attached an image of data file that I want to work with in this question, if that helps. It's opened in notepad++.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

Your file is not appropriate for dlmread. Use textscan (link) instead.

This should get you started:

fidi = fopen(MyFolderInfo(4).name, 'rt');
Data = textscan(fidi, '%s%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%s', 'HeaderLines',8, 'CollectOutput',1);

You may have to experiment with the name-value pairs in textscan to work with your file. See the documentation for all the possibilities.