remove last line data file

A MATLAB script is made to load data from a .xyz file into the workspace. The datafile consists of three columns of numbers, the number of lines varies per file, about 800 to 1000 lines. However, the file has also text which I would like to ignore. I would like to make a script that automatically removes/ignores the text in the file. How to get rid of the last line of the file? 1 1 1 2 4 0 6 8 0 . . . . . . . . . tekst Thanks for your answer, - A

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Antoine - if you are interested in removing the last line from the file (which includes non-numeric text), then try using importdata which seems to ignore the last line if it isn't numeric. For example, if your text file, test.txt, has the following contents

 12 12 12
 13 13 13
 14 14 14
 15 15 15
 a final line with non-numeric text

then

 data = importdata('test.txt')

returns

 data =
    12    12    12
    13    13    13
    14    14    14
    15    15    15

Try the above and see what happens!

[Antoine van Hirtum]

The first 14 lines should also be removed/ignored. Can I still use importdata. How does the code look like now?

[Geoff Hayes]

Check the documentation for this function and look at the headerLinesIn input parameter. You could try using it as follows

 fileData = importdata('test.txt',' ' ,14);

where ' ' indicates that row element is using the space character as the delimiter, and 14 is the number of header lines. So if your text file now looks like

 a
 b
 c
 d
 e
 f
 g
 h
 i
 j
 k
 l
 m
 n
 12 12 12
 13 13 13
 14 14 14
 15 15 15
 a final line with non-numeric text

then calling the above line of code will set fileData to be a structure with two fields - the numeric data, and the alphabetic textdata. So

 fileData.data =
    12    12    12
    13    13    13
    14    14    14
    15    15    15

Try experimenting with the importdata function.