Scanning for floats in different formats

I am looking for a robust solution to extract all numbers from raw data files coming in varying formats (see below). My code is currently scanning through each line of the raw data file and extracting all floats by using textscan(line, '%f').

This method works fine for a data that looks like this:

Cyclic Acquisition Time: 28.107748 Sec 10/3/2017 5:34:26 PM

A B C

mm N segments

0.43347636 275.24789 198

0.054932408 27.816936 199

0.43500644 276.26346 200

0.052249052 26.64908 201

...

But doesnt work for data like that:

"Elapse Time ","Disp ","Disp ","Load 1 ","Load 1 ","T2_Chamber","T2_Chamber","Axial cmd","Axial cmd",

"Sec ","mm ","mm ","N ","N ","C ","C ","V ","V ",

0.00000 , -0.486, -2.425, 18.22, -150.81, 91.0, 90.0, 0.300, -5.303,

0.00000 , -0.289, -0.336, 9.30, -17.66, 90.6, 89.9, 0.641, 0.534,

33.36000 , -0.630, -2.395, -15.02, -149.87, 91.0, 90.0, 0.081, -5.250,

33.36000 , -0.630, -2.395, -14.98, -150.05, 90.6, 89.9, 0.082,

...

Thanks in advance!

Marcel

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

The second data set uses a comma delimiter and you can ignore the top two lines by specifying the HeaderLine property. I've tested this with a copy-pasted version of your second data set.

fid = fopen('mydata.txt');
t = textscan(fid, '%f', 'Delimiter', ',', 'HeaderLines', 2)

[Marcel Staniszewski]

Thank you very much! I overlooked the delimiter property for textscan...

On another note, ist there a specific function to determine the delimiter symbol without user input?

Edit: I found a solution that works for me - thank you!

[Walter Roberson]

readmatrix() should autodetect delimiter