From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Jan  8 22:12:42 2004
Subject: Re: textread ; ignoring header lines
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: Y U Sasidhar <sasidhar at chem dot iitb dot ac dot in>
Cc: Octave_post <help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 23:12:20 -0500

If your file contains columns of numbers, you don't want to use 
textread.
It will be slow.  You may be able to use load directly since load
understands some comment styles.  You may also be able to use
dlmread('file',' ',skip,1), but I haven't tried it.

Otherwise you will have to do something like:

	* UNTESTED *
	fid = fopen(file);
	for i=1:skip, fgets(fid);
	data = fscanf(fid,"%f",Inf);
	data = reshape(data,n,length(data)/n)';

If you really do need textread (because you have mixed
strings and numbers) then extended it to understand

	textread(...,'headerlines',n)

Please post the changes so they can be added back to
octave-forge.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle at users dot sf dot net

On Jan 8, 2004, at 9:49 AM, Y U Sasidhar wrote:

> many times the data files have a few header lines beginning with #,  at , 
> %  etc
> followed by columns of data like:
>
> # comment1
>  at  another comment
>
> 1    2    3
> 4    5    6
>
> etc
>
> how do I tell textread to ignore those header lines ?



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