How do import data?

For this part I have to get data from the first row. Which I know you use fgetl. But what if my data has 4 columns and 5 rows. And I want to get data from the first column. How do I do that?

if true

 % filename='lab4_data.txt';
fid=fopen(filename,'r'); %opening read only
temperature=fgetl(fid);
temperature=str2num(temperature);
fclose(fid);code
  end

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

   [a,~,~,~]=textread('file.txt')