Question

Is there any character or character combination that MATLAB interprets as comments, when importing data from text files? Being that when it detects it at the beginning of a line, will know all the line is to ignore?

I have a set of points in a file that look like this:

And as you can see he doesn’t seem to understand them very well. Is there anything other than // I could use that MATLAB knows it’s to ignore?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you use the function textscan, you can set the CommentStyle parameter to // or %. Try something like this:

fid = fopen('myfile.txt');
iRow = 1;
while (~feof(fid)) 
    myData(iRow,:) = textscan(fid,'%f %f\n','CommentStyle','//');
    iRow = iRow + 1;
end
fclose(fid);

That will work if there are two numbers per line. I notice in your examples the number of numbers per line varies. There are some lines with only one number. Is this representative of your data? You’ll have to handle this differently if there isn’t a uniform number of columns in each row.