Importing big txt files

I have text file (.txt) of size around 20gb. I need to import it to Matlab.

I tried using A = load('file.txt') , but it's showing error using load.

The error says:

Error using load

Requested 50000x72014 (26.8GB) array exceeds maximum array size preference. Creation of arrays greater than this limit may take a long time and cause MATLAB to become unresponsive. See array

size limit or preference panel for more information.

What to do now?

[Rik]

That depends on what you want to do with it. Since you probably don't have 27GB contiguous blocks of free memory, you won't be able to load the data, nor work with it all in one go. Depending on what you want to do, there might be a way to avoid loading all the data into memory.