how to read a text file with numbers and strings

Hi

so i have a textfile that has numbers and strings as shown below:

   1   74 8.00 50.27 0.20 0.97 0.50 7.76 0.42 8.55 BM_1587 SDE53 EXP003/60P -2.486e-001 no
   2  -54 7.00 38.48 0.20 0.96 0.61 8.16 0.55 8.54 BM_1588 SDE53 EXP003/60P -2.357e-001 no

and i want to read it and use a for loop to see if any of the numbers don't match a certain number in the 11th column of the text file because ultimately i am trying to make the program skip the folders it had already read and calculated. the code is:

fileID = fopen('newfiles.txt','a+');% opens the text file
L= importdata('newfiles.txt','\t')% gives me the rows in the text file
bee= numel(L)                     %gives the actual number of rows
file = textread(fileID, '%4.0f\t %4.0f\t %4.2f\t %4.2f\t %4.2f\t %4.2f\t %4.2f\t %4.2f\t %4.2f\t %4.2f\t %s\t %s\t %s\t %4.3d\t','\t','\n')%trying to read the text file
for j=1:L
  if x==file(j,11)
    re_pit= 10;
    continue
  else
    re_pit= 20;
  end  
end
if re_pit==10
  continue
end
fclose(fileID);

[Stephen23]

It would probably be much faster and neater to read the whole file into MATLAB, and perform the comparison all at once. Doing this in a loop is going to be much slower.