Part of the code is useless. The following
A = fileread(txt)
already opens the file, reads it as text, and closes it. After it is executed, A contains the full content of the file. So then there is no need to open the file again and read one line (and forget to close it).
As explained by Per below, STRFIND matches strict occurrences of the text that you are looking for. You could observe that it is difficult to use it for matching patterns (situations a little more flexible than the simple occurrence of letters). Looking for white spaces before and after was a good first attempt, but there are cases where it fails .. and there is the upper/lower case issue.
All these considerations are a good signal that you need an approach a little more elaborate based on pattern matching, using regular expressions. This is what Per develops. Note that he uses REGEXPI and not REGEXP, to provide a case-insensitive solution.
Your code should look a bit like the following:
textContent = fileread( textFile ) ;
countWord1 = length( regexpi( textContent, ... )) ;
countWord2 = length( regexpi( textContent, ... )) ;
counts = [countWord1, countWord2] ;
where ... are appropriate arguments (at least the pattern). Even better:
wordsToFind = {'and', 'here', 'not'} ;
textFile = 'MyFile.txt' ;
counts = zeros( size( wordsToFind )) ;
textContent = fileread( textFile ) ;
for wordId = 1 : numel( wordsToFind )
pattern = sprintf( '\\<%s\\>', wordsToFind{wordId} ) ;
counts(wordId) = length( regexpi( textContent, pattern )) ;
end
where we loop over a series of words defined in a cell array, and we build the pattern proposed by Per dynamically.
