How to read a certain part of data from a very complicated text file containing many empty lines

Hi, the text file includes several data structures, delimited by empty lines, like the following: -----------------------------------------

Empty line...

Empty line...

             X   Y   Z
            0.2  0.3 0.4
            0.2  0.3 0.4
            0.2  0.3 0.4

Three Empty lines...

   A   B   C   D   E   F   G

Empty line...

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

Four Empty lines...

        F R I S T  G R O U P  L O A D I N G

Empty line...

            YY  YY*C
           -0.9  0.154
           -0.8  0.023
           -0.7  0.087
           -0.6  0.098

Empty lines... Other complicated data forms...

-------------------------------------------------

I need only the YY YY*C part, to read the data into a matrix. I've tried textscan and fgetl, neither work since textscan only read one type of data structure,the data format I want is not very distinct from others; and fgetl tend to take empty lines as end of file marker, so it stops at empty lines.

Does anyone has any idea? Thanks a lot since this is very difficult for me to figure it out!

Answer 1

[Chandra Kurniawan]

Hi, Pengfei

Let say that I have a text file formated :

               X   Y   Z
              0.2  0.3 0.4
              0.2  0.3 0.4
              0.2  0.3 0.4
        
        
        
     A   B   C   D   E   F   G

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

          F R I S T  G R O U P  L O A D I N G
              YY  YY*C
             -0.9  0.154
             -0.8  0.023
             -0.7  0.087
             -0.6  0.098

Here my code :

fid = fopen('data.txt');
idk = 0;
tline = fgetl(fid);
while ischar(tline)
    idk = idk + 1;  
    data01{idk} = tline;      
    tline = fgetl(fid);        
end
fclose(fid);

idx = 1;
for x = 19 : 22
    data02{idx} = textscan(data01{x},'%f %f');
    idx = idx + 1;
end

I succesfully reading your data by knowing that

YY YY*C is in line 18, so I start reading from line 19

to 22.

[Pengfei]

Hi Chandra, Thanks so much!

Looks like I was wrong to take empty lines as end of file marker...