Reading text file from a certain string onwards in matlab -

[11/01/15 - 17:50] refa,2,5,600,  [11/01/15 - 17:52] refb,1,3, [11/01/15 - 17:54] refa,2,10,1200,  [11/01/15 - 17:55] refb,1,6, 

i have text file of several lines of above format. how can start reading text file refa , store 2,5,600 in matlab?

you can regular expressions. find parts of string begin [ , end ] , replace them null string, or ''. can done regexprep.

as such, read in entire text file first, eliminate portions don't need. assuming text file in file called text.txt, this:

fid = fopen('text.txt', 'r'); out = textscan(fid, '%s', 'delimiter', '\n'); out = regexprep(out{1}, '\s*\[.*\]\s*', ''); 

the first line of code opens file reading. next part reads in each line of text cell array, output 1 element nested cell array, each cell within single line of text file. last line accesses single nested element , finds portion of string there white space, beings [ character, has bunch of characters inside, ends ] character , again white space after that. find portions of text, , replace them null string. gives portion of text looking for.

by placing example text in file called text.txt, get:

out =   'refa,2,5,600,' 'refb,1,3,' 'refa,2,10,1200,' 'refb,1,6,' 

now if want numerical values, can use indexing:

out = cellfun(@(x) x(6:end-1), out, 'uni', 0); 

now, work code (in comments), try this:

fileid = fopen('stack.txt');  d = textscan(fileid, '%s', 'delimiter', '\n');  fclose(fileid);  d = regexprep(d{1}, '\s*\[.*\]\s*', ''); d = cellfun(@(x) x(6:end-1), d, 'uni', 0);  %// extract out numbers numbers = regexp(d, '(\d+)*', 'tokens');  %// @ lines have 3 numbers idx = cellfun(@numel, numbers) == 3;  %// extract out lines numbers_extract = numbers(idx);  %// convert string numbers refa.pkttype = cellfun(@(x) x(1), numbers_extract); refa.datalength = cellfun(@(x) x(2), numbers_extract); refa.ticks = cellfun(@(x) x(3), numbers_extract);