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Asked: 2026-06-16T23:19:09+00:00

This should be trivial, but I can’t find the answer in the MATLAB documentation.

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This should be trivial, but I can’t find the answer in the MATLAB documentation. I have a TSV file consisting of ~60,000 rows and 38 columns. The first row has the names of the columns, and the first column consists entirely of alphanumeric strings. The remaining entries are all floating-point numbers (although, in many cases the value is expressed as just 0, without an explicit decimal point).

How can I read this data into MATLAB?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    MATLAB provides a function textscan for this purpose. The second argument is the format specifier. In your case, the first field is a string, so we use %s, the remaining fields are float values, so we use %f. You will need 37 repeats of %f – a few more than in this example:

    fid = fopen('yourfile.tsv');
C = textscan(fid, '%s %f %f %f %f %f %f', 'HeaderLines', 1);
fclose(fid);

    HeaderLines tells textscan how many lines to skip before starting. You mention that the first line in your file contains the column names, so we skip 1 line.

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