Loading ASCII data files quickly

[Matthias Brennwald]

Dear all

I've got a few data files with a short header followed by two colums  
of data (see example below). The header data is marked by '*' signs,  
like this:

------------------------------
* TMD data written by MATAA on 10-Aug-2009 15:37:39
* MSW, 0 deg., no filter
0       -6.49888e-08
1.04167e-05     -1.77097e-07
2.08333e-05     2.53872e-07
3.125e-05       9.02216e-07
4.16667e-05     1.13457e-06
5.20833e-05     6.72286e-07
6.25e-05        -1.5686e-07
7.29167e-05     -6.71451e-07
8.33333e-05     -5.46739e-07
9.375e-05       -7.39792e-08
0.000104167     1.52549e-07
0.000114583     -9.41797e-08
.
.
.
------------------------------

I tried to read line by line using fgetl(...) into a string. If the  
line starts with an '*', it is treated as header line. Otherwise it is  
transformed into numbers using str2num(...). This line-by-line  
procedure works, but is too slow for large files. I believe it would  
be much more efficient to read only the header lines using this  
method, and then use a file command that loads the rest of the data in  
one step. Any hints or ideas how I can do this?

Matthias


----
Matthias Brennwald, Käferholzstrasse 173, CH-8046 Zürich, +41 44 364  
17 03