erroneous read data from grid file related to digits formatting

Hello everybody

i have a weird formated ascii file, that is quite similar with the one discussed here.

after removing all unrelated text from the file , I end up with a cell containgin all the numbers and i have to change it to double format.

in order to do that i use

data(:,:,i) = reshape( sscanf( blocks, '%4d' ), 1440, 720 ).' ;

the format is that data could be either 3 or 4 digit. when 3 digit, there is a whitespece before the value. when 4 digits are succesive the ascci looks like

559 584 656 84811281610184216791461128412291089 667 574

but matlab format the output as

559 584 656 8481 1281 6101 ...

instead of

559 584 656 848 1128 1610...

i have checked the output char and

the fisrt value is whitespace. and checked every 4th value (5,9 etc) for this line and seem correct (whitespace when 3 digit data, first digi when 4-digit data)/

i have tried replacing whitespaces with zeros

but still reads the same erroneous data.

so any idea of how to handle this would be really helpful