Textscan for comma seperated file with mixed format

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I am trying to use the textscan function with a text file where the delimiter is a comma(,). I load the text file using:
f=fread(fid,'*char')';
Which gives me a variable f that looks like:
f = '2020-01-20 00:00:00,1,2,4,5,Not Connected,,,NaN,10,5';
The variable f contains strings and numeric data but I only want to use the numeric data. The format can change between measurements and the data does have multiple lines which I am not able to recreate now in the example.
Using code: textscan(f,'%f',11,'delimiter',',') will not give me an output as expected. I would expect a 11 by x cell array with only floating numbers or else a NaN.
How can I get this code to work?

Accepted Answer

Bob Thompson
Bob Thompson on 20 Jan 2021
Have you tried using readtable? It has a delimited text option, and tends to be a bit better about handling different types of data.
f = readtable(fid,'Filetype','delimitedtext','Delimiter',',');
This is untested, because I don't have access to a sample file for you, but it should be something of that form.
  1 Comment
Thijs Van de Wiel
Thijs Van de Wiel on 20 Jan 2021
Yes I have tried that, unfortuanetly it did take quite a lot of time to compute that for a large data set. Therefore I preferred using textscan since if the data set would be all floating numbers this method is the fastest.

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