How to ignore or delete the last row of a text file when importing?

I am reading in data using textscan. Often times the last row of data is bad and throws an error. How can I ignore the last line? or is there code to delete the last row of data in the text file programmatically?

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

It’s difficult to be specific without your file. If you know how many lines you want to read, you can set that limit as a parameter.

From the documentation:

• C = textscan(fileID,formatSpec,N) reads file data using the formatSpec N times, where N is a positive integer. To read additional data from the file after N cycles, call textscan again using the original fileID. If you resume a text scan of a file by calling textscan with the same file identifier (fileID), then textscan automatically resumes reading at the point where it terminated the last read.

[Al]

I placed this code prior to texscan

fid = fopen('your_file.TXT','r');
fseek(fid, 0, 'eof');
chunksize = ftell(fid);
fseek(fid, 0, 'bof');
ch = fread(fid, chunksize, '*uchar');
nol = sum(ch == sprintf('\n')); % number of lines
fclose(fid)

Then I replaced the N in

C = textscan(fileID,formatSpec,N)

with

nol-2

This did it. Thank you.

[Star Strider]

My pleasure!

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

Put it in a try catch block. Look it up in the help. You can just have your catch block be empty if you want to ignore any errors.