Easy textscan question. What is this input?

I have inherited a script with many textscan functions like the one below

textscan(fid, '%*s %*s %f\n\r',1,'HeaderLines',19)

So this skips 19 lines, then reads and ignores two strings and then finds the next number and returns it and ignores the rest of the line, right?

But what does the '1' do? Does that serve any purpose? Is that how many times to repeat the operation? That seems pointless if the number is one, and I have many of these with '1's...

[Sara]

Yes, 1 is the number of times it repeats the ignore 2 strings, read number instruction

[Andrew Reibold]

Ok, thats what I originally thought but it seemed pointless and I usually use 'fgetl' so I wasn't familiar with textscan.

Thanks for confirming. If you want to add comment as an answer I will accept to give you credit and so it doesn't pop up as unanswered.

Answer 1

[Sara]

Yes, 1 is the number of times it repeats the ignore 2 strings, read number instruction. You can use fgetl to read one line at a time, but with textscan you can read something that's a mix of strings and numbers and extract only what you care about.

[Andrew Reibold]

Thanks Sara. This helped me