Question

I am reading data from a table using textscan(). The table has 90 columns and I want to read each column’s values as a floating-point number. Looking at the documentation, I have to use specifier %f – but it seems I need to use it 90 times, so I end up with this:

c = textscan(fid,'%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f
                  %f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f
                  %f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f
                  %f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f');

which basically works, but I am wondering whether there is some way around to avoid typing specifier for every column I have in my table.

Answer 1

Use repmat to build your format string based on the number of columns.

nCols = 60;
format = repmat('%f', [1 nCols]);
c = textscan(fid, format);

This is flexible enough to use if you had e.g. a couple string columns mixed in.

nNumberCols = 58;
format = ['%s%s' repmat('%f', [1 nNumberCols])];
c = textscan(fid, format);