Read in a .txt format with textread

Hi,

I want to read in a txt file with textread

File 20130419.txt:

19.04.2013;00:00:00;0.000;0;-9.999;0;13;0.08;10640;<SPECTRUM>ZERO</SPECTRUM>
19.04.2013;00:01:00;0.000;0;-9.999;0;13;0.08;10698;<SPECTRUM>ZERO</SPECTRUM>
19.04.2013;00:02:00;0.000;0;-9.999;0;13;0.08;10660;<SPECTRUM>ZERO</SPECTRUM>
...

i wrote in Matlab:

[date,time,R,NS,Z,RT,T,heat,laser,spec] = textread('20130419.txt', ...
             '%f %f %f %d %f %d %f %f %f %s', ...
             'delimiter',';', ...
              -1, ...
             'headerlines',0);

now matlab told me this:

Error using dataread
Param/value pairs must come in pairs.

Error in textread (line 174)
[varargout{1:nlhs}]=dataread('file',varargin{:}); %#ok<REMFF1>

Error in bspBA (line 2)
[date,time,R,NS,Z,RT,T,heat,laser,spec] = textread('20130419.txt','%f %f %f %d %f %d %f %f %f
%s','delimiter',';',-1,'headerlines',0);

How can I read in my file?

[Star Strider]

Where does the ‘-1’ come from here:

... ,'delimiter',';',-1, ...

What do you want to do with it?

[dpb]

I presume it was intended to be the repetition counter for the format string use; <0 is same as inf but it was misplaced in the argument list order--must follow the format string directly.

Answer 1

[dpb]

Besides the comment noted above by Star, your format string doesn't match the record -- the date/time fields aren't valid '%f' fields; you'll either have to read them as character or parse the day.month.year and hr:min:sec fields as separate variables.

textread has much to commend it for simple files where can avoid returning a cell array and the hoopla of fopen/fclose but it doesn't handle such fields as date/times as well as some of the other alternatives--*textscan* in particular which with a recent Matlab release has the datetime class and a date format string to read the dates and times directly. But, to read this file, the format string would need to be

fmt=['%2d.%2d.%2d %2d:%2d:%2d' repmat('%f',1,6) '%s'];
[day,mon,yr,hr,min,sec,R,NS,Z,RT,T,heat,laser,spec] = textread('20130419.txt', fmt, inf, ...
                                                               'headerlines',0, ...
                                                               'delimiter',';');

All in all, it would be better to move to textscan, use the %D format string and return the numeric data in an array rather than create so many variables.