writing cell array to file

Hi,

I have a large text file with entries/lines that look like as follows.

-60,-69,""
-63,-77,""
-64,-79,""
-69,-85,""
-75,-91,""
-75,-91,""
-79,-77,""

I need to extract the first N (say three) lines and write them to another text file. I am doing the following.

fp_in=fopen(input_file_name, 'r');   
inDump=textscan(fp_in, '%s%s%s', 'Delimiter', ',');
outDump={inDump{1}(1:3) inDump{2}(1:3) inDump{3}(1:3)};
T=cell2table(outDump);
writetable(T,output_file_name);

The output file comes out with the columns of the input file transposed. This is what I see in the output file.

-60,-63,-64,-69,-77,-79,"","",""

Thanks for any tips.

[Walter Roberson]

outDump={inDump{1}(1:3); inDump{2}(1:3); inDump{3}(1:3)};

[Amjad Luna]

Tried already. Gives me

-60,-63,-64

-69,-77,-79

"","","","",""

Answer 1

[Sravya Pulavarthi]

Hi Amjad, you can use readtable and writetable to do this:

>> r = readtable(input_file_name);
>> N = 3; % Since you want to extract the first 3 lines of your file
>> writetable(r(1:N,:), output_file_name, "QuoteStrings", true, "WriteVariableNames", false);