How can I format fscanf to read strings of different lengths, some with spaces in them?

I'm trying to read comet names from a text file with fscanf and when I use %s, the read stops at the first space in the name, then considers the remaining string to be the next data field. When I use %c which is supposed to read spaces, and format %Nc using a value of N that's large enough for the largest name, the shorter names have part of the next data field (large integers) read in as part of the name. BTW, not all of the names have spaces, so '%s%s' doesn't work either. Thank you.

[Stephen23]

@David Holman: please upload a sample file by editing your question and clicking the paperclip button.

Answer 1

[dpb]

Can't always read a mal-formed input file; if the data strings contain embedded blanks they need to be quoted strings.

Probably the only way to do this otherwise would be to read in each full record as a string then do a lookup to a known database--but if you make the database, there's probably no reason to read the file.

[Walter Roberson]

Yup.

Is there a delimiter such as comma that marks the end of the name field?

Answer 2

[Cedric]

Wild guess:

 cometNames = strtrim( strsplit( fileread( 'MyFile.txt' ), ',' )) ;

will work, provided that you adapt the delimiter to your case.

[dpb]

That should work, indeed, if there is a delimiter but it seemed to me the OP implied there wasn't...

[Cedric]

I think that he forgot to mention the presence of some delimiter, otherwise the data in the file cannot be exploited at all and it makes no sense. Let's wait and see ... ;)

[dpb]

Doesn't look promising on OP returning, unfortunately... :( apropos to your recent posting on features.

OTOH, came to me perhaps it's a name per record which wouldn't need delimiter nor quoted string if were to read the file on a line-by-line basis. Likely we'll never know...

[Cedric]

Ah you read it! I don't think that we'll have the remote electric shocks, but I am still hopeful about the [Poke] button ;)

[dpb]

I'm in favor...(of both) :) It's seemed to me to becoming worse in that regards...very discouraging to get not even a sniff. Wonder if could at least record the poster's id came back--do they have that much info???

[Cedric]

I think that just imposing an email verification during the account creation (which I think/hope is the case) and giving us the possibility to at least have the TMW server send a reminder (through some button, even if we cannot add text) would be efficient. Of course it would not get people who black list mathworks, but I don't think that people are that bad in general. I guess that often they receive an email when they get an answer, and if they don't receive anymore email they believe that there is no activity (even though we are adding comments with suggestions or asking for more details).