How to ignore letters while using fscanf?

I have data sets that are text file that look something like this:

Area Mean Min Max

1 25 239 170 351

2 25 250.120 155 442

3 25 259.360 159 477

I have been using a code that uses fscanf to read these files into arrays. However, I have to delete the header of the text files for it to work properly. Here is the bit of code with fscanf:

fprintf('\n reading in .txt file')

        if nFile > 1 
            filename = filenameAll{dataind}; 

            formatSpec = '%f%f%f%f%f%[^\n\r]';
                        fid = fopen([pathname filename]);
                        rawdata=fscanf(fid, '%f %f %f %f %f', [6 inf]);
                        rawdata=rawdata';
        else
            fid = fopen([pathname filenameAll]);
                        rawdata=fscanf(fid, '%f %f %f %f %f', [6 inf]);
                        rawdata=rawdata';
        end

Is there a way to "tell" the code to ignore alphabetical letters? Or instead, to remove the letters before using fscanf?

Thanks in advance!

[Jan]

formatSpec is not used. Does the file really contain blank lines after each line of data?

[Katherine]

No, there aren't blank lines after the lines of data, the lines just showed up when I copy-pasted some data.

Answer 1

[Jan]

fid = fopen(fullfile(pathname, filenameAll));
fgets(fid);  % Ignore first line
rawdata = fscanf(fid, '%f %f %f %f %f', [6 inf]);

[Katherine]

This works. Thanks for your help!

[Killian McManus]

Hi Jan,

Is there any faster way of ignoring the first line? I need precise timing and it is taking ~1.5secs to run

[Jan]

@Killian: Reading one line cannot take 1.5 seconds, except it has many MB of data. What exactly takes 1.5 seconds? How large is the file? Is it stored on a network drive?