Loading Files with mixed text and numbers

[fritz]

I did this all the time with Matlab--loaded files with the very common 
form of records like this:
2017/07/07,   13:59:59,   022.2,   12.69

I found the matlab "textscan" absurdly complicated for this simple task, 
generating nested table arrays with lots of associated book keeping of 
braces, brackets etc. So I finally used matlab "readtable" which worked 
fine.

When I tried this in Octave it became apparent that the readtable 
function is not implemented. Using csvread leads me to invalid results 
(it apparently is for numbers and does not support the date strings).

So - short or writing loops does Octave implement something similar to 
readtable or some simple way to perform this task--loading comma 
separated strings into a regular array?

Thanks
Fritz