How can I stop textread from reading [1x1 char] and ' '?

Hello all, I am trying to read data from a .txt file in the form of:

name; Date; web; 
AB7103G2; "December2, 1992"; 8.759000;

When I read it using textscan and then text read...

c=textscan(fid, '%s %q %s');
[a,b,c]=textread(file,'%s %q %s')

...I will ger a result like:

a=
     'name;'
     [1x1 char]
     'AB7103G2'
     [1x1 char]
     'AB9902G4'

or

b=
    'Date;'
    ''
    'December2, 1992'
    ''

How can I get rid of the [1x1 char] and the '' in my results for test read?

Thank you, kelsey

Answer 1

[Kelly Kearney]

It looks like there might be some additional characters/columns in your file that are causing problems; just running a test on your small example seems to work fine.

txt = sprintf('%s\n', 'name; Date; web;','AB7103G2; "December2, 1992"; 8.759000');
c = textscan(txt, '%s%q%s', 'delimiter', ';', 'headerlines', 0, 'collectoutput', true);
c{1}

ans = 

    'name'        'Date'               'web'     
    'AB7103G2'    'December2, 1992'    '8.759000'

Note that I also specified a few extra options that you may or may not want to keep. Can you attach a small sample file to so we can see what might be the issue?