Re: file where sep decimals is comma

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 09/23/2011 09:13 AM, Sebastian Kruk wrote:
> Hi, I have a csv file where sep is ";" and I have "," as decimal point.
>
> How I can import directly in Octave?
>
> An example:
>
> 1953;1453,6
> 1954;1480,1
> 1955;1576,4
> 1956;1621,5
> 1957;1655,3

One way is to do it entirely within Octave, by reading the file as-is, 
doing string substitution of your delimiters, and reading back the 
resulting string. Here's the Octave code, assuming that your file is 
called "data":

a=fread(fopen("data"));
a(a==",")=".";
a(a==";")=",";
b=reshape(sscanf(strvcat(a'),"%f,%f"),2,32)';

an alternative might be to use an external utility, e.g. using Perl:

system("perl -pe 's/,/./g;s/;/,/g' data > b")
load b

I suspect that there are less awkward/quirky ways of implementing the 
pure-Octave version---can anyone suggest something nicer looking?