Importing data skip lines with fopen - matlab

Question

I try to skip lines 5 to the end of the file from a .txt-file I import into Matlab.
fidM = fopen('abc.txt', 'r');
for i = 5:150
fgetl(fidM);
end
buffer = fread(fidM, Inf) ;
fclose(fidM);
fidM = fopen('xyz.txt', 'w');
fwrite(fidM, buffer) ;
fclose(fidM) ;
The code above does not do the job somehow. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Your code currently reads the first 146 lines of your file, discards them, then reads the remainder and writes that out to a file. Instead, if you want to just write the first 5 lines of abc.txt into xyz.txt, then do something like the following:
fid = fopen('abc.txt', 'r');
fout = fopen('xyz.txt', 'w');
for k = 1:5
fprintf(fout, '%s\r\n', fgetl(fid));
end
fclose(fid);
fclose(fout);
Or you can remove the loop and do something like this:
fid = fopen('abc.txt', 'r');
% Read in the first 5 lines
contents = textscan(fid, '%s', 5);
fclose(fid);
% Write these to a new file
fout = fopen('xyz.txt', 'w');
fprintf(fout, '%s\r\n', contents{1}{:});
fclose(fout);