Treating -999 values in ASCII as missing

[Paulo Santiago]

Dear Octave community,

This is probably an easy question for an experienced Octave user.

I have some data stored in ASCII files which I use 'load' command to read. In those files, missing values are stored as -999.

I would like to know how do I say to Octave, at read time, that those -999 values must be treated as missing values.

Is there a simple function to do this?

I've searched this, but found nothing. The best I can think is to span all the data with a for-loop, checking every matrix element and replacing it when was the case.

Thanks in advance!