Importing Data from a .txt file into Matlab - matlab

Question

First of all thank you for reading my question.
I am trying to import data from a file with following format into Matlab:
#Text
#Text: Number
...
#Text: Number
Set1:
1 2
3 4
Set2:
5 6
7 8
...
I would like to get those numbers into two matrices of the form:
(1 5
3 7)
and
(2 6
4 8)
I started by only building the first of those two matrices.
Winkel = 15;
xp = 30;
M = readtable('Ebene_1.txt')
M([1:4],:) = [];
M(:,3) = [];
for i=0:Winkel-1
A = table2array(M((2+i*31:31+i*31),1))
end
But this solution only gave me cell arrays which I could not transform into normal vectors.
I also tried to use the importdata command, but could not find a way to get this to work either. I know there are many other questions similar to mine, but I could not find one where all the data were in a single column. Also, there are many Matlab-commands for importing data into Matlab and I am not sure which would be the best.
First time asking such a question online so feel free to ask me for more details.

Answer 1

You can import the data you provided in your sample using readtable, however because of the format of your file you will need to tweak the function a bit.
You can use detectImportOptions to tell the function how to import the data.
%Detect import options for your text file.
opts = detectImportOptions('Ebene_1.txt')
%Specify variable names for your table.
opts.VariableNames = {'Text','Number'};
%Ignore last column of your text file as it does not contain data you are interested in.
opts.ExtraColumnsRule = 'ignore';
%You can confirm that the function has successfully identified that the data is numeric by inspecting the VariableTypes property.
%opts.VariableTypes
%Read your text file with detectImportOptions.
M = readtable('Ebene_1.txt',opts)
Now that you have table M, simply apply basic Matlab operations to obtain the matrices as you specified.
%Find numerical values in Text and Number variables. Ignore NaN values.
A = M.Text(~isnan(M.Text));
B = M.Number(~isnan(M.Number));
%Build matrices.
A = [A(1:2:end)';A(2:2:end)']
B = [B(1:2:end)';B(2:2:end)']
Output:
A =
1 5
3 7
B =
2 6
4 8