Parsing a text file by character

I would like to parse a 331 string of characters into cells but the number of characters per cell is not the same for all?

For example, if I have text like the following

24359_435934009____________90909

where _=space

And I want to put it into a matrix such that

characters 1-5 go into column 1 (a.k.a 24359)

character 6 goes into column 2 (ak.a. NaN)

characters 7-10 goes into column 3

etc

The data comes as a .txt file.

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Why 7-10 ? and not 7-15

Answer 1

[Alberto]

If there are several lines, you can extract them using this:

fid=fopen(fileName)

B = textscan(fid, '%f %f %f', 'Delimiter'-' ', 'MultipleDelimsAsOne', 1);

fclose(fid)

It extracts three columns, if you need more columns change the part '%f %f %f'. But this only works if there are 3 numbres in each row.

If you have diferent numbers in each row, you should parse using regexp for each line.

Answer 2

[Ammar]

That did not seem to work. I have attached example data. Each line should be 331 characters which includes spaces.

I want to parse the data into a matrix.

Column 1 should be characters 1-8 (so cell 1,1 should be 79006444)

Column 2 should be characters 9-18

Column 3 should be character 19

Column 4 should be characters 20-21

Column 5 should be characters 22

Column 6 should be character 23

Column 7 should be character 24

Column 8 should be characters 25-27

.....

areas with spaces need to be replaced with NaN

[Alberto]

The extraction mode depends on what you know about the structure of the file. I think this should work:

B = textscan(fid, '%f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f', 'Delimiter', ' ', 'MultipleDelimsAsOne', 1);