Issue while converting java.lang.string to number

Hello everyone!

I have a code that reads part of a xml file using getTextContent method. The output data is a java.lang.String type string. This is usually a N×3 looking string on which I do str2num() to make a N×3 matrix. So far it worked without any issue. But I came to a problem while my data format was like this:

val =

             -4.5600 **********   201.2678 
             -4.5594    37.8202   201.2920 
             -4.5587    37.8767   201.3163 
             -4.5581    37.9339   201.3406 
             -4.5574    37.9918   201.3649 
             -4.5568    38.0504   201.3892 
             -4.5562    38.1098   201.4136 
             -4.5555    38.1698   201.4380 
             -4.5549    38.2305   201.4625

Now asterisk (*) being a special character in Matlab, while I do str2num() on the string it returns an empty matrix. The first line is not so important, so I tried to get rid of the first line. As it is a java string, I failed to do it. I tried converting it to char by doing char(val) but it becomes 1×(N*3) char which makes it hard to process.

I would like to get rid of the first line & have the java string converted to a (N-1)×3 matrix. Any clue? The string I am trying to convert is uploaded as a mat file here.

I understand xml2struct can convert XML data directly to numbers, but my whole code is written using xmlread() so I cannot go back and rewrite everything due to this problem.

Any help is really appreciated.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

char_array = reshape( char(TheJavaString), [], 3);
new_char_array = char_array(2:end, :);

[Protik Das]

Thanks. But unfortunately it doesn't work. When you do char(TheJavaString) all the data is separated into characters and cannot be reshaped again. The data in a mat file is in here: TheJavaString.

[Walter Roberson]

Your array is not an N x 3 looking string: it is a vector of data separated by newlines.

temp = textscan(char(data),'%f%f%f', 'TreatAsEmpty', '**********', 'CollectOutput', 1);
val = temp{1};

The result will be a 4001x3 array of double. If you do not want the first line then you can

val = temp{1}(2:end,:);

[Protik Das]

Worked perfect! Thanks a lot.