Reading text file word by word
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Input is the attached text file, with one long word, a newline, then several equal-length short words separated by white spaces. I would like to read the first word in a variable, then the other ones in another variable one by one, rather than all into a single string or into a single huge cell array. I tried to do this with fscanf in several ways, but failed, and even got the impression that fscanf is not complying with https://fr.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fscanf.html no clue about what I am doing wrong.
fileID = fopen('dataset_300_8.txt');
long_word = fscanf(fileID, '%[$ACGT]'); % is there another way to stop reading at newline?
short_word = ' ';
while ~isempty(short_word)
short_word = fscanf(fileID, '%s'); % does not work: shouldn't %s stop as it encounters a white space?
% short_word = fscanf(fileID, '%10s'); % this also does not work
% short_word processing code here
end
fclose(fileID);
4 Comments
Accepted Answer
jonas
on 13 Oct 2018
Edited: jonas
on 13 Oct 2018
Try this minor change
short_word = fscanf(fileID, '%s+');
↑
Edit: After further testing, any character after the %s gives the same results as it causes the fscanf to stop reading (due to mismatch). Another iteration begins where the previous attempt failed, so at the next word.
More Answers (1)
Image Analyst
on 13 Oct 2018
"I would like to read the first word in a variable, then the other ones in another variable one by one, rather than all into a single string or into a single huge cell array." <--- this is a really bad idea. I'm sure Stephen will soon give you the reasons why.
Better solution is to use fileread() followed by strsplit() to make the single cell array.
str = fileread('dataset_300_8.txt'); % Read entire file.
ca = strsplit(str, ' '); % Put each word into a cell
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