Extract n lines from a text file

Hi Everybody, i am struggling with the following problem. I need to extract, from a text file (actually an xml file, anyway) the first n lines. I know there are some functions (as fscanf) in which the user can specify the number of characters to extract, but in my case this number is variable, therefore i cannot specify a priori where it is.

An alternative could be: finding the "ending character" by identifying some key word, and then using this ending character in fscanf. But i did not find a way to identify pieces of text within a longer text.

Does anyone know a possible solution? Luciano

[Oleg Komarov]

Is "n" fixed?

[Thomas]

Can you give an example file where you want to remove the first n lines..

Answer 1

[per isakson]

Something like this might work

    fid  = fopen( 'cssm.txt', 'r' );
    str  = permute( fread( fid, '*char' ), [2,1] );
    sts  = fclose( fid );
    cac  = regexp( str, 'your_key_word', 'split' );
    buf = strtrim(cac{2});
    ca  = textscan( buf, frmt );

or replace regexp by strfind