Traversing Text Document Matlab

Please provide guidance on this particular inquiry. All responses are highly valued and will be used to further knowledge(not just looking for a copy and paste solution). I am attempting to read a Microsoft Word dictionary into Matlab. From here I would like to be able to traverse it and extract words of a specific length, say four letter words, and put them into an array. Then I would like to select random words from the array and put them into a matrix. ?

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

Reading from word doc

Here's the general approach to reading a Microsoft word document.

directory = 'C:\Users\AOC\Documents\MATLAB'; 
file = 'myDocFile.docx'; 

% Full path to the MS Word file
filePath = fullfile(directory,file);
% Read MS Word file using actxserver function
word = actxserver('Word.Application');
wdoc = word.Documents.Open(filePath);
txt = wdoc.Content.Text;
Quit(word)
delete(word)

The variable txt is a char array containing the text in your document.

Extracting 4-letter words

There are several approaches you could use. This one is fast and doesn't require segementing each word and counting each word-length. Instead, it uses a regular expression to search for this pattern:

[non-letter],[4-letters],[non-letter]

It also uses strtrim() to remove the leading and trailing white space.

% Extract 4-letter words. 
s = strtrim(regexp(txt, '([^a-zA-Z])[a-zA-Z]{4}([^a-zA-Z])', 'match'));  

s is a 1xn cell array of 4-letter words at character arrays.

Randomly select words

You can't put non-numeric values into a matrix but you can put them into a cell array. This example below chooses n random values from the extracted words.

n = 10; 
if n > numel(s)
    error('There are only %d words available. You selected %d words.' numel(s), n)
end
randIdx = randi(numel(s),1,n); 
randWords = s(randIDx);   % Here is your random selection

[xRobot]

I don't actually have my own text document with words in it. I am trying to export the default dictionary from word into my script assuming the dictionary will have many words that I can extract from it and use in my script. I know that one can create a custom dictionary in MS word but i do not have time to manually make a large file of words.

[Adam Danz]

If you find where the dictionary file is saved I could help you scrape it. Alternatively, there are probably LOTS of dictionary files available on the internet. Example.

[xRobot]

I have obtained a .txt file. I would like to read it into my script. I would like to put it into a string array after extracting four letter words. Which would be more effecient for reading in the file fscanf? textscan?

[xRobot]

fileID = fopen('mylist.odt','r');

formatSpec = '%s';

words = fscanf(fileID,formatSpec);

I have used the above code to read in the file. It read in as a 1x11102 char. What I would like to do is convert this to a string array.

[Adam Danz]

Has your question been answered in the link below?

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/491952-read-in-text-file-as-string-array