Remove space in a string while parting data using sscanf.

I am reading a file that has this line:

Pressure Offsets: -0.206,-0.025,0.004 ,-0.099,-0.598

There is an extra space after "0.004" that I would like to remove before parsing the data using a while loop. The particular portion of interest in my while loop is

      elseif ((length(tline)>15) && isequal(tline(1:16),'Pressure Offsets'))
          pressure_offset_wse_proto = sscanf(replace(sscanf(tline,'%*s %*s %s'),',',' '),'%f')

This code works fine when there is no space after the "0.004", so I'd like to modify this section of my script to automatically remove any spaces between the numbers in the line. I have many separate files to parse using my script, so I need to programmatically remove any extra spaces (or parse the data with the extra space included). Can someone please tell me how to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

Here is a radically different approach, using regexp instead of sscanf:

tline = "Pressure Offsets: -0.206   ,-0.025,0.004 ,-0.099,-0.598";
pressure_offset_wse_proto = double(regexp(tline,["-?\d+\.?\d*"],"match"))'

pressure_offset_wse_proto = 5×1

-0.2060 -0.0250 0.0040 -0.0990 -0.5980

This will work regardless of the presence of multiple extra spaces (like I inserted).

The regular expression returns all strings that have these elements, in order

• minus sign (or not)
• one or more digits
• decimal point (or not)
• zero or more digits

Then I use double() to convert that string array into numeric.

[Allen Hammack]

Thank you!

I incorporated your suggestion into my script, and I'm getting an error. My code is

file_name = 'data_file.txt';
fid = fopen(file_name,'rt');
n = 0;    
while(n>-1)
  tline = fgetl(fid);
  if ((length(tline)>15) && isequal(tline(1:16),'Pressure Offsets'))
      pressure_offset_wse_proto = double(regexp(tline,["-?\d+\.?\d*"],"match"))';
  else
  end
end

and the error i'm getting is

Error using double
Conversion to double from cell is not possible.

I've attached my data file for your reference. What am I doing wrong?

[the cyclist]

My code assumed an input string, rather than a character array. A quick & dirty way to do this is to convert it:

pressure_offset_wse_proto = double(regexp(string(tline),["-?\d+\.?\d*"],"match"))';

[Allen Hammack]

Everything works now! Thank you, @the cyclist!