Sounds like a regular expression is the way to go.
fid = fopen('YourFile.txt','rt');
expression = '([\d.]+)' % matches one or more digits and .
% a more advanced expression is (\d+(?:\.\d*)?|\.\d+)
while true
thisline = fgetl(fid);
value = regexp(thisline,exp,'match'); % perform the regular expression
value = value(0);
end
