I need to efficiently skip lines in text file

I'm reading in a formatted text data file and pulling data from it. Every so often there is a break in the data and its 4 lines long. I'm reading the lines with "fgetl" and right now to skip those lines I just use

for i = 1:4
    line = fgetl(fileID);    
end

This seems terribly inefficient and brute force. Is there a better way?

--Clarification The skipped lines have information in them, just information I don't use. I'm also trying to avoid saving any information temporarily for the skipped lines.

[Cedric]

Could you give an example of both types of lines and define the elimination criterion?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Repeated fgetl() is going to be more efficient than what the others have shown here when you are working with text files. fgetl() is a low-level routine that talks directly to the I/O stream used by the operating system libraries.

If you were working with non-text files (that is you did not use the 't' flag when you opened them) and if you knew exactly how many bytes the 4 lines occupied in total including the line delimiters, then you could fseek() forward that many bytes.

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

You can use textscan

fid=fopen('fic.txt');
str=textscan(fid,'%s','HeaderLines',5,'delimiter','\r\n');
fclose(fid)