formatSpec = '%{yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm}D%f%f%f%f%f%f%g%{^\n\r}';
The curly brackets don't belong around the trailing %{^\n\r} to skip remainder of line; use square brackets there instead. There are six numeric fields following the date column in the file which match the %f but the last column is character so the %g will fail. If you don't want that column, I'd use %*s for it altho the skip rest of line will work if just delete the %g.
To debug, these kinds of things, copy a line of the file to a string variable in the command window and then can use textscan on that string to debug a little at a time by parsing pieces of the string at a time.
formatSpec = '[%{yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm}D' repmat('%f',1,6) '%*s'];
Testing here (altho my release doesn't include the datetime class so I read the date fields as strings)...
>> s='08/31/2015 7:42 0.031 0.084 0 0 0 0 v';
>> fmt = ['%s %s' repmat('%f',1,6) '%*s'];
>> textscan(s,fmt,'collectoutput',1)
ans =
{1x2 cell} [1x6 double]
>> ans{:}
ans =
'08/31/2015' '7:42'
ans =
0.0310 0.0840 0 0 0 0
>>
Voila!!! NB: I also used 'collectoutput' to minimize the cell arrays into two instead of several...
