Reading and writing a 2-column table of strings to text file

I have a novice question on saving to and loading from text files. I'm new to Matlab, so I need very simple step-by-step instructions on how to do this. Perhaps it is in a tutorial somewhere, that would be fine if someone could point me to it.

I want to save and load values as a text file with two columns. There is a mix of strings and numbers, so everything could be converted to strings before saving. That would be fine.

The first column is a list of parameter names, the second is the value of these parameters.

For example , the first column with three rows might be "parameter name 1", "parameter name 2", "parameter name 3". The second column of three rows might be "100", "200", "Off".

I would like to create this text file, and be able to load and interpret it again. Thank you!

Answer 1

[Takumi]

You can find many ways by following the links below.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/text-files.html

[Peter de Goot]

Thanks. This is in part the problem. What is the easiest/best way given my simple example. I tried writetable(T) and this was not the most pleasant thing to work with, since it requires first constructing a table and so on. Would you suggest first creating a cell array and then using writecell(C)?

[Takumi]

Does that mean you want to create the output file programmatically?

[Takumi]

I made a sample program. Is it helpful?

names = {'param1','param2','param3'};
values = [100,200,NaN];
fname = 'test.txt';
output = [names',num2cell(values)'];
writecell(output,fname)

clear
data = readcell('test.txt');
Names = data(:,1);
Values = cell2mat(data(:,2));

[Peter de Goot]

Thank you, yes, this is within a program using app designer. The example is very clear, thank you!