How to sparsely read a large file in Matlab? - matlab

Question

I ran a simulation which wrote a huge file to disk. The file is a big matrix v. I can't read it all, but I really only need a portion of the matrix, say, 1:100 of the columns and rows. I'd like to do something like
vtag = dlmread('v',1:100:end, 1:100:end);
Of course, that doesn't work. I know I should have only done the following when writing to the file
dlmwrite('vtag',v(1:100:end, 1:100:end));
But I did not, and running everything again would take two more days.
Thanks
Amir

Answer 1

Thankfully the dlmread function supports specifying a range to read as the third input. So if you wan to read all N columns for the first 100 rows, you can specify that with the following command
startRow = 1;
startColumn = 1;
endRow = 100;
endColumn = N;
rng = [startRow, startColumn, endRow, endColumn] - 1;
vtag = dlmread(filename, ',', rng);
EDIT Based on your clarification
Since you don't want 1:100 rows but rather 1:100:end rows, the following approach should work better for you.
You can use textscan to read chunks of data at a time. You can read a "good" row and then read in the next "chunk" of data to ignore (discarding it in the process), and continue until you reach the end of the file.
The code below is a slight modification of that idea, except it utilizes the HeaderLines input to textscan which instructs the function how many lines to ignore before reading in the data. The first time through the loop, no lines will be skipped, however all other times through the loop, rows2skip lines will be skipped. This allows us to "jump" through the file very rapidly without calling any additional file opertions.
startRow = 1;
rows2skip = 99;
columns = 3000;
fid = fopen(filename, 'rb');
% For now, we'll just assume you're reading in floating-point numbers
format = repmat('%f ', [1 columns]);
count = 1;
lines2discard = startRow - 1;
while ~feof(fid)
% Use "HeaderLines" to skip data before reading in data we care about
row = textscan(fid, format, 1, 'Delimiter', ',', 'HeaderLines', lines2discard);
data{count} = [row{:}];
% After the first time through, set the "HeaderLines" (i.e. lines to ignore)
% to be the # we want to skip between lines (much faster than alternatives!)
lines2discard = rows2skip;
count = count + 1;
end
fclose(fid);
data = cat(1, data{:});
You may need to adjust your format specifier for your own type of input.