import data from txt file with strings

%I have a txt file contains both double and string characters.

% a.txt=

1 100 150

2 110 130

p.2 122 144 %for example

%I wanna retrieve all data from this txt file, I use importdata(a) then only doubles can be read.

v=importdata(a)

v=

   1 100 150

   2 110 130

%p.2 doesn't look in v. How can I retrieve all data from txt file?

Answer 1

[dpb]

Use textscan instead; it can deal with non-regular data (with help from the formatting strings passed). It will return cell arrays for the fields which can include various data types. NB, however, that a more-or-less random mixture of text and numeric values can be very difficult to parse unless there is a pattern that you can exploit. At the worst, you may have to read the file as character line-by-line ( fgetl) and parse each field.