Loading a text file with strings and numbers

I am trying to load in a txt file that has strings and numbers. The attached text file is organized with 1 column and 5 rows containing “a 2 t 1.5 n”. The only number is “1.5” with the rest being strings.

I need the code to store each item as a separate variable. For example variable 1 = a, variable 2 = 2, variable 3 = t ect.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Adam Danz]

"The only number is “1.5”..."

I see a 2 in there, too.

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

"The only number is “1.5”..."

I see a 2 in there, too.

"I need the code to store each item as a separate variable."

That would require dynamic variable naming which is a bad practice that results in additional problems. See https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/304528-tutorial-why-variables-should-not-be-named-dynamically-eval

A better solution it to store the values in a cell array that you can reference by indexing.

The first line reads in the text file as a cell array of character vectors.

The second line converts any character vectors that are numeric to numeric values.

c = strsplit(fileread('Test.txt')).';
c(~isnan(cellfun(@str2double,c))) = num2cell(str2double(c(~isnan(cellfun(@str2double,c)))));

Now you can access the n-th value by indexing

c{n}

[Adam Bosco]

For the sake of the code, the 2 is used as a string. Sorry for the confusion.

Thank you for the help!

[Adam Danz]

Hmmm, how will Matlab know which elements to convert to numeric? Or, are you keeping all elements as strings or char-arrays? If that's what you're doing, you'll only need the first line of my answer.

Does this solve the problem for you?

[Adam Bosco]

Yep this solved my problem. Thanks!

[Adam Danz]

Glad I could help.