Matlab: Parsing strings - matlab

How can I turn strings like 1-14 into 01_014? (and for 2-2 into 02_002)?
I can do something like this:
testpoint_number = '5-16';
temp = textscan(testpoint_number, '%s', 'delimiter', '-');
temp = temp{1};
first_part = temp{1};
second_part = temp{2};
output_prefix = strcat('0',first_part);
parsed_testpoint_number = strcat(output_prefix, '_',second_part);
parsed_testpoint_number
But I feel this is very tedious, and I don't know how to handle the second part (16 to 016)

As you are handling integer numbers, I would suggest to change the textscan to %d (integer numbers). With that, you can use the formatting power of the *printf commands (e.g. sprintf).
*printf allows you to specify the width of the integer. With %02d, a 2 chars wide integer, which will be filled up with zeros, is printed.
The textscan returns a {1x1} cell, which contains a 2x1 array of integers. *printf can handle this itsself, so you just have to supply the argument temp{1}:
temp = textscan(testpoint_number, '%d', 'delimiter', '-');
parsed_testpoint_number = sprintf('%02d_%03d',temp{1});

Your textscanning is probably the most intuitive way to do this, but from then on what I would recommend doing is instead converting the scanned first_part and second_part into numerical format, giving you integers.
You can then sprintf these into your target string using the correct 'c'-style formatters to indicate your zero-padding prefix width, e.g.:
temp = textscan(testpoint_number, '%d', 'delimiter', '-');
parsed_testpoint_number = sprintf('%02d_%03d', temp{1});
Take a look at the C sprintf() documentation for an explanation of the string formatting options.

Related

How to calculate the number of appearance of each letter(A-Z ,a-z as well as '.' , ',' and ' ' ) in a text file in matlab?

How can I go about doing this? So far I've opened the file like this
fileID = fopen('hamlet.txt'.'r');
[A,count] = fscanf(fileID, '%s');
fclose(fileID);
Getting spaces from the file
First, if you want to capture spaces, you'll need to change your format specifier. %s reads only non-whitespace characters.
>> fileID = fopen('space.txt','r');
>> A = fscanf(fileID, '%s');
>> fclose(fileID);
>> A
A = Thistexthasspacesinit.
Instead, we can use %c:
>> fileID = fopen('space.txt','r');
>> A = fscanf(fileID, '%c');
>> fclose(fileID);
>> A
A = This text has spaces in it.
Mapping between characters and values (array indices)
We could create a character array that contains all of the target characters to look for:
search_chars = ['A':'Z', 'a':'z', ',', '.', ' '];
That would work, but to map the character to a position in the array you'd have to do something like:
>> char_pos = find(search_chars == 'q')
char_pos = 43
You could also use containters.Map, but that seems like overkill.
Instead, let's use the ASCII value of each character. For convenience, we'll use only values 1:126 (0 is NUL, and 127 is DEL. We should never encounter either of those.) Converting from characters to their ASCII code is easy:
>> c = 'q'
c = s
>> a = uint8(c) % MATLAB actually does this using double(). Seems wasteful to me.
a = 115
>> c2 = char(a)
c2 = s
Note that by doing this, you're counting characters that are not in your desired list like ! and *. If that's a problem, then use search_chars and figure out how you want to map from characters to indices.
Looping solution
The most intuitive way to count each character is a loop. For each character in A, find its ASCII code and increment the counter array at that index.
char_count = zeros(1, 126);
for current_char = A
c = uint8(current_char);
char_count(c) = char_count(c) + 1;
end
Now you've got an array of counts for each character with ASCII codes from 1 to 126. To find out how many instances of 's' there are, we can just use its ASCII code as an index:
>> char_count(115)
ans = 4
We can even use the character itself as an index:
>> char_count('s')
ans = 4
Vectorized solution
As you can see with that last example, MATLAB's weak typing makes characters and their ASCII codes pretty much equivalent. In fact:
>> 's' == 115
ans = 1
That means that we can use implicit broadcasting and == to create a logical 2D array where L(c,a) == 1 if character c in our string A has an ASCII code of a. Then we can get the count for each ASCII code by summing along the columns.
L = (A.' == [1:126]);
char_count = sum(L, 1);
A one-liner
Just for fun, I'll show one more way to do this: histcounts. This is meant to put values into bins, but as we said before, characters can be treated like values.
char_count = histcounts(uint8(A), 1:126);
There are dozens of other possibilities, for instance you could use the search_chars array and ismember(), but this should be a good starting point.
With [A,count] = fscanf(fileID, '%s'); you'll only count all string letters, doesn't matter which one. You can use regexp here which search for each letter you specify and will put it in a cell array. It consists of fields which contains the indices of your occuring letters. In the end you only sum the number of indices and you have the count for each letter:
fileID = fopen('hamlet.txt'.'r');
A = fscanf(fileID, '%s');
indexCellArray = regexp(A,{'A','B','C','D',... %I'm too lazy to add the other letters now^^
'a','b','c','d',...
','.' '};
letterCount = cellfun(#(x) numel(x),indexCellArray);
fclose(fileID);
Maybe you put the cell array in a struct where you can give fieldnames for the letters, otherwise you might loose track which count belongs to which number.
Maybe there's much easier solution, cause this one is kind of exhausting to put all the letters in the regexp but it works.

Why can't the matlab textscan function read + 22.24 as a float?

I'm currently having a problem with the matlab function textscan.
I got a data file which looks like this:
1,2018/08/14 17:06:15, 0,+ 22.24,+ 22.46,+ 18.18,+0.0000,+0.0005,LLLLLLLLLL,LLLLLLLLLL,LLLL
or sometimes when a sensor isn't working properly it looks like this:
1,2018/07/11 17:02:53, 0,+ 23.88,+ 24.78,+ 23.65,+++++++,+ 23.94,+ 23.01,+ 24.33,LLLLLLLLLL,LLLLLLLLLL,LLLL
Since the data varies from file to file I am creating a matching formatSpec from the headerline.
In the 1st case it would look like
formatSpec = '%*u %s %*u%f%f%f%f%f%*[^\n]'
and in the 2nd case like
formatSpec = '%*u %s %*u%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%*[^\n]'
I am using the texscan function like this:
textscan(fileID, formatSpec_data, data_rows, 'Delimiter', ',', 'TreatAsEmpty', {'+++++++'},'EmptyValue', NaN, 'ReturnOnError', 0 );
but it keeps throwing an error on me with the message
Error using textscan
Mismatch between file and format character vector.
Trouble reading 'Numeric' field from file (row number 1, field number 4) ==> + 23.88,+ 24.78,+ 23.65,+++++++,+ 23.94,+ 23.01,+ 24.33,LLLLLLLLLL,LLLLLLLLLL,LLLL\n
Error in data_logger (line 31)
dataArray = textscan(fileID, formatSpec_data, data_rows, 'Delimiter', delimiter, 'HeaderLines' ,startRow, 'TreatAsEmpty', {'+++++++'},'EmptyValue', NaN, 'ReturnOnError', 0 );
When I deactivate 'returnOnError' then textscan reads only the first row and except the date/time string everything is just empty. I also tried to use textscan without TreatAsEmpty and / or EmptyValue but I get the same result.
I really don't get why textscan got problems to read e.g. ,+ 22.24 as a float.
When I specify formatSpec to read all the data as strings it works but then I have to use str2num afterwards which I don't really want to do.
I'm thankful for every help and looking forward to understand this behaviour.
Short answer: Matlab doesn't like the space between the + and the number in those fields. I think the simplest solution may be to just tell Matlab to ignore the + by calling it white space. Add the arguments 'WhiteSpace','+' when you call textscan, like this:
textscan(fileID, formatSpec_data, data_rows, 'Delimiter', ',', 'EmptyValue', NaN, 'ReturnOnError', 0 , 'WhiteSpace', '+');
Note that I also removed the 'TreatAsEmpty' argument, because once you consider all the + as white space, it is empty anyway.
Another option would be to pre-parse the file and remove the space between the + and the number. You could read the file using fileread, do a replacement using strrep or regexprep, then run textscan on the result.
datain = fileread('mydatafile.csv')
datain = strrep(datain,'+ ','+');
textscan(datain, formatSpec_data, data_rows, 'Delimiter', ',', 'TreatAsEmpty', {'+++++++'},'EmptyValue', NaN, 'ReturnOnError', 0 );
Finally, if you get stuck where you absolutely have to read as text then convert to numeric values, try str2doubleq, available on the Matlab File Exchange. It is much faster than str2double or str2num.

read complicated format .txt file into Matlab

I have a txt file that I want to read into Matlab. Data format is like below:
term2 2015-07-31-15_58_25_612 [0.9934343, 0.3423043, 0.2343433, 0.2342323]
term0 2015-07-31-15_58_25_620 [12]
term3 2015-07-31-15_58_25_625 [2.3333, 3.4444, 4.5555]
...
How can I read these data in the following way?
name = [term2 term0 term3] or namenum = [2 0 3]
time = [2015-07-31-15_58_25_612 2015-07-31-15_58_25_620 2015-07-31-15_58_25_625]
data = {[0.9934343, 0.3423043, 0.2343433, 0.2342323], [12], [2.3333, 3.4444, 4.5555]}
I tried to use textscan in this way 'term%d %s [%f, %f...]', but for the last data part I cannot specify the length because they are different. Then how can I read it? My Matlab version is R2012b.
Thanks a lot in advance if anyone could help!
There may be a way to do that in one single pass, but for me these kind of problems are easier to sort with a 2 pass approach.
Pass 1: Read all the columns with a constant format according to their type (string, integer, etc ...) and read the non constant part in a separate column which will be processed in second pass.
Pass 2: Process your irregular column according to its specificities.
In a case with your sample data, it looks like this:
%% // read file
fid = fopen('Test.txt','r') ;
M = textscan( fid , 'term%d %s %*c %[^]] %*[^\n]' ) ;
fclose(fid) ;
%% // dispatch data into variables
name = M{1,1} ;
time = M{1,2} ;
data = cellfun( #(s) textscan(s,'%f',Inf,'Delimiter',',') , M{1,3} ) ;
What happened:
The first textscan instruction reads the full file. In the format specifier:
term%d read the integer after the literal expression 'term'.
%s read a string representing the date.
%*c ignore one character (to ignore the character '[').
%[^]] read everything (as a string) until it finds the character ']'.
%*[^\n] ignore everything until the next newline ('\n') character. (to not capture the last ']'.
After that, the first 2 columns are easily dispatched into their own variable. The 3rd column of the result cell array M contains strings of different lengths containing different number of floating point number. We use cellfun in combination with another textscan to read the numbers in each cell and return a cell array containing double:
Bonus:
If you want your time to be a numeric value as well (instead of a string), use the following extension of the code:
%% // read file
fid = fopen('Test.txt','r') ;
M = textscan( fid , 'term%d %f-%f-%f-%f_%f_%f_%f %*c %[^]] %*[^\n]' ) ;
fclose(fid) ;
%% // dispatch data
name = M{1,1} ;
time_vec = cell2mat( M(1,2:7) ) ;
time_ms = M{1,8} ./ (24*3600*1000) ; %// take care of the millisecond separatly as they are not handled by "datenum"
time = datenum( time_vec ) + time_ms ;
data = cellfun( #(s) textscan(s,'%f',Inf,'Delimiter',',') , M{1,end} ) ;
This will give you an array time with a Matlab time serial number (often easier to use than strings). To show you the serial number still represent the right time:
>> datestr(time,'yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS.FFF')
ans =
2015-07-31 15:58:25.612
2015-07-31 15:58:25.620
2015-07-31 15:58:25.625
For comlicated string parsing situations like such it is best to use regexp. In this case assuming you have the data in file data.txt the following code should do what you are looking for:
txt = fileread('data.txt')
tokens = regexp(txt,'term(\d+)\s(\S*)\s\[(.*)\]','tokens','dotexceptnewline')
% Convert namenum to numeric type
namenum = cellfun(#(x)str2double(x{1}),tokens)
% Get time stamps from the second row of all the tokens
time = cellfun(#(x)x{2},tokens,'UniformOutput',false);
% Split the numbers in the third column
data = cellfun(#(x)str2double(strsplit(x{3},',')),tokens,'UniformOutput',false)

Read textfile with a mix of floats, integers and strings in the same column

Loading a well formatted and delimited text file in Matlab is relatively simple, but I struggle with a text file that I have to read in. Sadly I can not change the structure of the source file, so I have to deal with what I have.
The basic file structure is:
123 180 (two integers, white space delimited)
1.5674e-8
.
.
(floating point numbers in column 1, column 2 empty)
.
.
100 4501 (another two integers)
5.3456e-4 (followed by even more floating point numbers)
.
.
.
.
45 String (A integer in column 1, string in column 2)
.
.
.
A simple
[data1,data2]=textread('filename.txt','%f %s', ...
'emptyvalue', NaN)
Does not work.
How can I properly filter the input data? All examples I found online and in the Matlab help so far deal with well structured data, so I am a bit lost at where to start.
As I have to read a whole bunch of those files >100 I rather not iterate trough every single line in every file. I hope there is a much faster approach.
EDIT:
I made a sample file available here: test.txt (google drive)
I've looked at the text file you supplied and tried to draw a few general conclusions -
When there are two integers on a line, the second integer corresponds to the number of rows following.
You always have (two integers (A, B) followed by "B" floats), repeated twice.
After that you have some free-form text (or at least, I couldn't deduce anything useful about the format after that).
This is a messy format so I doubt there are going to be any nice solutions. Some useful general principles are:
Use fgetl when you need to read a single line (it reads up to the next newline character)
Use textscan when it's possible to read multiple lines at once - it is much faster than reading a line at a time. It has many options for how to parse, which it is worth getting to know (I recommend typing doc textscan and reading the entire thing).
If in doubt, just read the lines in as strings and then analyse them in MATLAB.
With that in mine, here is a simple parser for your files. It will probably need some modifications as you are able to infer more about the structure of the files, but it is reasonably fast on the ~700 line test file you gave.
I've just given the variables dummy names like "a", "b", "floats" etc. You should change them to something more specific to your needs.
function output = readTestFile(filename)
fid = fopen(filename, 'r');
% Read the first line
line = '';
while isempty(line)
line = fgetl(fid);
end
nums = textscan(line, '%d %d', 'CollectOutput', 1);
a = nums{1}(1);
b = nums{1}(2);
% Read 'b' of the next lines:
contents = textscan(fid, '%f', b);
floats1 = contents{1};
% Read the next line:
line = '';
while isempty(line)
line = fgetl(fid);
end
nums = textscan(line, '%d %d', 'CollectOutput', 1);
c = nums{1}(1);
d = nums{1}(2);
% Read 'd' of the next lines:
contents = textscan(fid, '%f', d);
floats2 = contents{1};
% Read the rest:
rest = textscan(fid, '%s', 'Delimiter', '\n');
output.a = a;
output.b = b;
output.c = c;
output.d = d;
output.floats1 = floats1;
output.floats2 = floats2;
output.rest = rest{1};
end
You can read in the file line by line using the lower-level functions, then parse each line manually.
You open the file handle like in C
fid = fopen(filename);
Then you can read a line using fgetl
line = fgetl(fid);
String tokenize it on spaces is probably the best first pass, storing each piece in a cell array (because a matrix doesn't support ragged arrays)
colnum = 1;
while ~isempty(rem)
[token, rem] = strtok(rem, ' ');
entries{linenum, colnum} = token;
colnum = colnum + 1;
end
then you can wrap all of that inside another while loop to iterate over the lines
linenum = 1;
while ~feof(fid)
% getl, strtok, index bookkeeping as above
end
It's up to you whether it's best to parse the file as you read it or read it into a cell array first and then go over it afterwards.
Your cell entries are all going to be strings (char arrays), so you will need to use str2num to convert them to numbers. It does a good job of working out the format so that might be all you need.

Textscan Matlab ; Doesn't read the format

I have a file in the following format:
**400**,**100**::400,descendsFrom,**76**::0
**400**,**119**::400,descendsFrom,**35**::0
**400**,**4**::400,descendsFrom,**45**::0
...
...
Now I need to read, the part only in the bold. I've written the following formatspec:
formatspec = '%d,%d::%*d,%*s,%d::%*d\n';
data = textscan(fileID, formatspec);
It doesn't seem to work. Can someone tell me what's wrong?
I also need to know how to 'not use' delimiter, and how to proceed if I want to express the exact way my file is written in, for example in the case above.
EDITED
A possible problem is with the %s part of the formatspec variable. Because %s is an arbitrary string therefore the descendsFrom,76::0 part of the line is ordered to this string. So with the formatspec '%d,%d::%d,%s,%d::%d\n' you will get the following cells form the first line:
400 100 400 'descendsFrom,76::0'
To solve this problem you have two possibilities:
formatspec = %d,%d::%d,descendsFrom,%d::%d\n
OR
formatspec = %d,%d::%d,%12s,%d::%d\n
In the first case the 'descendForm' string has to be contained by each row (as in your example). In the second case the string can be changed but its length must be 12.
Your Delimiter is "," you should first delimit it then maybe run a regex. Here is how I would go about it:
fileID = fopen('file.csv');
D = textscan(fileID,'%s %s %s %s ','Delimiter',','); %read everything as strings
column1 = regexprep(D{1},'*','')
column2 = regexprep(D{2},{'*',':'},{'',''})
column3 = D{3}
column4 = regexprep(D{4},{'*',':'},{'',''})
This should generate your 4 columns which you can then combine
I believe the Delimiter can only be one symbol. The more efficient way is to directly do regexprep on your entire line, which would generate:
test = '**400**,**4**::400,descendsFrom,**45**::0'
test = regexprep(test,{'*',':'},{'',''})
>> test = 400,4400,descendsFrom,450
You can do multiple delimiters in textscan, they need to be supplied as a cell array of strings. You don't need the end of line character in the format, and you need to set 'MultipleDelimsAsOne'. Don't have MATLAB to hand but something along these lines should work:
formatspec = '%d %d %*d %*s %d %*d';
data = textscan(fileID, formatspec,'Delimiter',{',',':'},'MultipleDelimsAsOne',1);
If you want to return it as a matrix of numbers not a cell array, try adding also the option 'CollectOutput',1