Problem plotting sequential data files with headers

Hello. I managed to read from a sequence of files which contain numeric data in 3 columns of different lengths. I can overlay plot the first and second columns OK. How might i change the code to cope with a 3 line character header in each data file?

Tried importdata which has a header capability to but keep getting plot problems!

Any advice on whether this or another option might be better would be much appreciated. Dave

[Walter Roberson]

See readmatrix

[Brantosaurus]

Apologies Walter. I missed flagging i'm running 2017a and i believe readmatrix is 2019a :(

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

readtable with 'HeaderLines' option, after which you can table2array if you want. You might potentially need to use the ReadVariableNames false option.

In the special case that the three header lines all happen to start with % as their first non-blank character, then you can load() the text file and it will skip the lines that start with %

If you were using very large files and readtable() got to be a performance problem, you would fopen the file, and use textscan with a HeaderLines option and then cell2mat the resulting cell array and then fclose

[Brantosaurus]

Partial sucess with readtable. I couldn't find reference to use of 'HeaderLines' option, only 'NumHeaderLines',3 as argument in detectImportOptions. However it dosesn't have desired effect and script seems to work without either!

I forgot to mention files have a footer which i'd like to completely ignore (like the header). Footer begins with a row of asterisks followed by an unknown number of numeric lines. Tried 'omitrow' but it only omits the asterisks!