Question

I have a file with a list of records which I parse one line at a time. Each record is newline delimited and each value is space delimited. This is just a simplified example, but it has a similar structure to the real data.

Bob blue pizza
Sally red sushi

The first value is a name, then their favorite color, then their favorite food. Let’s say this is in a processing loop and I want to set variables up for each value. For the first line, my values should look like this.

friendsName = "Bob";
favoriteColor = "blue";
favoriteFood = "pizza";

I read in the line and start out with

lineInFile = "Bob blue pizza";

strsplit seems like a good idea, but it outputs a cell array instead of a matrix of strings and I end up with

strsplit(lineInFile, " ") =
{
  [1,1] = Bob
  [1,2] = blue
  [1,3] = pizza
}

I want something like

{friendsName,favoriteColor,favoriteFood} = strsplit(lineInFile, " ");

This gives me error: invalid lvalue function called in expression

Arrays can be used as lvalues, so I tried

cell2mat(strsplit(lineInFile, " "))
ans = Bobbluepizza

That’s not what I want.

Answer 1

This worked.

 [friendsName favoriteColor favoriteFood] = strsplit(lineInFile, " "){1,:}