How to read data as well as string headerlines?

Question

frewise 2011-12-1

Hi everyone, I have a file containing string and numbers like this

    ID height weight score
    a 160 80 66
    b 165 85 80
    c 170 90 67
    d 168 61 95

when I tried to read it into matlab, I used

[id,h,w,s]=textread('file','%s %f %f %f','headerlines',1)

which gave 4 vectors and omitted the headerline. I want the headerline also to be read into a vector, anyone knows how to do this?

Thank you, best!

Answer 1

Amith Kamath 2011-12-1

a quickfix but dirty solution is to read everything as a string, as

[id,h,w,s]=textread('data','%s %s %s %s')

From the textread function reference at http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/textread.html, it is clear that including 'headerlines' in your parameter list ignores the headerline indicated by the number after it.

Using %s for everything stores the data all in cells, which you can convert to what you want later as need be!