Re: read file, given a non-octave header

[Thomas Treichl]

the_verge schrieb:
> Thomas,
>
> Thanks for addressing my questions.  I'm really close to making it read
> properly, but I'm having a small problem:  The first row in my cell array is
> always the 3rd line of the file, regardless of whether it is a comment line
> or a line of data.  For some reason Octave doesn't seem to be ignoring the
> comments.  The reason it begins reading on the 3rd line is because of the
> fgetl(fid); fgetl(fid); that you put in there to ignore the descriptor
> lines.  Preferably, it would skip all 35 or so lines of comments, and then
> skip the two data description lines, and then begin reading from the first
> line of data.
>
> Any ideas on how to make it skip comment lines (preceded by a #)?
>
> Thanks,
> Vergil
>
> P.S. For reference, when I called the function that you wrote for me, here
> was my resulting cell array (you can see the description lines in there):
...

Try this

   function vret = parsedata (filename)
     [vfid, vmsg] = fopen (filename, "r");
     if (isempty (vmsg) == false), error (vmsg); endif

     vcnt = 1;             # Initialize counter for while loop
     vstr = fgetl (vfid);  # Get first line of data file
     while (vstr != -1)
       if (vstr(1) != "#") # Ignore every that starts with '#'
         [vret{vcnt,1}, vret{vcnt,2}, vret{vcnt,3}, vret{vcnt,4}, \
          vret{vcnt,5}, vret{vcnt,6}, vret{vcnt,7}] = \
            sscanf (vstr, "%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s", "C");
         vcnt = vcnt + 1;
       endif
       vstr = fgetl (vfid);
     endwhile

     fclose (vfid);
   endfunction

and copy the parsed data into a new variable if you don't like the two 
describtion lines:

  newdata = olddata{3:end,:}

Thomas