find number of columns on text file

Is it possible to determine the number of columns in a text file prior to importing the data into matlab?

I can determine the number of rows as follows:

fid = fopen('myFile.txt','rt');
nLines = 0;
while (fgets(fid) ~= -1),
  nLines = nLines+1;
end
fclose(fid);

However, is there a way of returning the number of columns? Some of the text files that I need to import contain several column and others contain only one column therefore I require the number of columns in a specific text file in order to use textscan. Note I cannot use importdata or dlmread as some of the files contain nans.

Amended: Consider I create two text files:

d1 = 1+(30-1).*rand(365,3);
d2 = 1+(30-1).*rand(365,1);

mkdir('C:\Matlab_Q');

filename = 'C:\Matlab_Q\ex1.txt';
fid = fopen(filename,'wt');
fprintf(fid,'%f\n',d2);
fclose(fid);

filename = 'C:\Matlab_Q\ex2.txt';
fid = fopen(filename,'wt');
fprintf(fid,'%f\t%f\t%f\n',d1');
fclose(fid);

I now wish to read the number of columns in each text file:

FNames = {'ex1','ex2'};
delimiter = '\t'; 

for i = 1:length(FNames);
    fid = fopen(fullfile('C:\Matlab_Q',[FNames{i} '.txt']),'rt');
    tLines = fgets(fid);
    numCols{i} = numel(strfind(tLines,delimiter)) + 1;
    fclose(fid);
end

This solution returns 1 where it should return 1 and 3. How can this be solved?

Answer 1

[José-Luis]

 delimiter = ' '; %or whatever
 fid = fopen('myFile.txt','rt');
 tLines = fgets(fid);
 numCols = numel(strfind(tLines,delimiter)) + 1;
 fclose(fid);

[Richard]

this solution does not work as I was hoping. Please look at amended section of the original post.

[José-Luis]

You are looking for the string '\t', not for a tab. Use instead:

 delimiter = char(9); %for a tab

Or

 delimiter = sprintf('\t','');

[Mitchell Thayer]

Snagged that piece of code for use in a parsing function. Thanks!

-:- Mitchell