What is the difference between these two reading table file funciton?

EPL = readtable("EPLresults.csv")

another one is =

EPL = readtable("EPLresults.csv","TextType","string")

what this TextType and string are doing here?

[Voss]

From the documentation for readtable:

TextType — Type for imported text data

'char' | 'string'

Type for imported text data, specified as the comma-separated pair consisting of 'TextType' and either 'char' or 'string'.

• 'char' — Import text data into MATLAB as character vectors.
• 'string' — Import text data into MATLAB as string arrays.

Example: 'TextType','char'

[Md Jonayet]

what is the importance of this function? and thank you for your reply.

[Voss]

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/characters-and-strings.html

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

If you have a particular variable (column) that contains some text, then do you want the text to be represented as a cell array of character vectors (the default) or do you want the text to be represented as a column vector of string() objects ('TextType', 'string') ? There are advantages and disadvantages to either choice.