Reading header section only from file

Hi,

I have a .txt file consisting of a header section and data section (attached). I am interested in only reading the header portion of the file, but what is the best way to do this? I would like the final output to be stored as a char as shown in the picture below, and have tried fscanf to do so but can't quite figure it out.

I am quite a novice with Matlab so any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Try this:

str = fileread('test.txt')
index = strfind(str, '[Data]');
header = str(1:(index-1));

[Walter Roberson]

You might perhaps want to go one step further and use

header(ismember(header, [10 13])) = '';

if you really want to remove all carriage returns and linefeeds as implied in your image. Your data would probably be easier to parse if you did not remove them.

[Dhani Dharmaprani]

Thank you so much, this works perfectly!

If you don't mind me asking, does this just use strfind to find the index of '[Data]' in the file, and then reads from the beginning of the file until the value before '[Data]'?

Thank you so kindly for your help!

[Walter Roberson]

No, the fileread() reads the entire content of the file. Then the location of [Data] is found in the resulting string, and only the part of the string up to there is kept.

[leydy Garcia]

what is [Data] in this example?

[Walter Roberson]

[Data] is line 295 of the user's file test.txt . It is the header that marks the end of the section the user wants to extract; the user wants the header section of the data rather than the numeric data.