I'm trying to import a width delimited txt file using the textscan function. The file is 80 characters wide, with no delimiter, and the desired resulting 12 columns are different widths of characters. I have tried to do this by specifying the width of the string, (i.e 12 strings, each of a different width of characters that add up to 80) but as soon as there is a space (because certain values are missing) MATLAB interprets this as my delimiter and messes up the format.
data= textscan(fileID, '%5s %7s %1s %1s %1s %17s %12s %12s %10s %5s %6s %3s');
I can work around this using Excel but this seems like a bad solution. Is there any way of doing this using MATLAB, maybe a different function than textscan/make textscan forget delimiters and just deal with width of the string?
You need to change the value of the delimiter and white space characters to empty:
format_string = '%5s %7s %1s %1s %1s %17s %12s %12s %10s %5s %6s %3s';
C = textscan(fid, format_string, 'delimiter', '', 'whitespace', '');
That way MATLAB will treat each character, including spaces, as valid characters.