Handling heterogeneous files

[ws]

Hi all,

I often have data files that have different types in their columns -- for 
example, an ISO timestamp in the first column (like "1990-03-04T14:01:01"), 
floats in the other columns, and the occasional string columns (["ok"; "ok"; 
"notok"; ...]).

Is there an easy way to import these and deal with them in octave/ matlab?  I 
especially would be happy if there were an automagic conversion of dates to 
Julian times, strings to integers (like factors), or whatever.  If there is a 
way to get it into a cell array, that would be OK, too.  What I want to avoid 
is writing a looping function with a bunch of calls to scanf ...

This is where R/ SPLUS really shines, but yuck.

Thanks!