Loading .log data with different number of columns

Dear all,

I would like to read the following log-file (see: attachment). I used the readtable()-function, but not all data is loaded properly. For instance, not all columns are getting loaded and some text-data is recognised as a Nan.

Do you have any suggestions on how to read the entire file?

Thanks already in advance!

Best,

Sophie

[Jon]

The individual rows (entries) in your log file seem to contain very different kinds of information. The number of entries in each row is not even the same. Clearly this can not be put into a table where each column contains the same kind of data.

What is it you want to do with this data? If you can clearly explain the context it might point the way to how best to read it in and parse it.

[Sophie96]

My goal is to filter the data regarding the second column. I would like to obtain seperate tables containing information about MAIN, RESMAN, TRACK, COMMUN etc.

I wouldn't mind if every column does not contain the same type of information (numbers and text data). But with my current solution not everything is getting loaded so that information is already missing in the first place.

I hope that helps!

[Stephen23]

Perhaps READCELL() ?

Answer 1

[Jon]

Yes, I would also recommend readcell, so for example

logdata = readcell('Example.log','NumHeaderLines',2)

You could then make another cell array with just the entries corresponding to a specific value occuring in the third column (for some reason the second column of spaces gets read in as missing, but it doesn't really matter) this has values such as 'MAIN', 'TRACK', etc. so for example you could make a cell array of just the entries for 'MAIN' using

mainLog = logdata(strcmp('MAIN',logdata(:,3)),:)

and then turn this into a table using

T = cell2table(mainLog)

and further into a timetable using

TT = table2timetable(T)

From which hopefully you can further extract the information of interest