I couldn't find an easy way to do this in Octave currently. You could use fopen()
to loop through the file and manually extract the data. I wrote a function that would do this on arbitrary data:
function varargout = coltextread(fname, delim)
% Initialize the variable output argument
varargout = cell(nargout, 1);
% Initialize elements of the cell array to nested cell arrays
% This syntax is due to {:} producing a comma-separated
[varargout{:}] = deal(cell());
fid = fopen(fname, 'r');
while true
% Get the current line
ln = fgetl(fid);
% Stop if EOF
if ln == -1
break;
endif
% Split the line string into components and parse numbers
elems = strsplit(ln, delim);
nums = str2double(elems);
nans = isnan(nums);
% Special case of all strings (header line)
if all(nans)
continue;
endif
% Find the indices of the NaNs
% (i.e. the indices of the strings in the original data)
idxnans = find(nans);
% Assign each corresponding element in the current line
% into the corresponding cell array of varargout
for i = 1:nargout
% Detect if the current index is a string or a num
if any(ismember(idxnans, i))
varargout{i}{end+1} = elems{i};
else
varargout{i}{end+1} = nums(i);
endif
endfor
endwhile
endfunction
It accepts two arguments: the file name, and the delimiter. The function is governed by the number of return variables that are specified, so, for example, [A B C] = coltextread('data.txt', ';');
will try to parse three different data elements from each row in the file, while A = coltextread('data.txt', ';');
will only parse the first elements. If no return variable is given, then the function won't return anything.
The function ignores rows that have all-strings (e.g. the 'A B C' header). Just remove the if all(nans)...
section if you want everything.
By default, the 'columns' are returned as cell arrays, although the numbers within those arrays are actually converted numbers, not strings. If you know that a cell array contains only numbers, then you can easily convert it to a column vector with: cell2mat(A)'
.