Reading tab-delimited ASCII files

[Matthias Brennwald]

Dear all

I've got some ASCII file containing data which I'd like to read into 
Octave. The ASCII files contain several lines and columns. The columns 
are separated by tabs. The first column contains strings or variable 
width (parameter names), the remaining columns contain mostly numbers 
and some NaN values (e.g. 'N/A'). As an example, a file might look like 
this:

K_G     1E-2    N/A     0.1
KD_FIN  2       1.9     1.8
KD_COA  0.2     0.02    1.2E-2
T_LI    9.3244  8.233   N/A

I tried using fscanf to read the data from the files, but I don't 
understand how to use the template parameter to specify the data format. 
I ended up reading line by line with fgetl and then analyzing each line 
seperately. This works, but it's slow. I believe that the fscanf 
function would be much faster. Can anyone give me an example of how to 
efficiently read ASCII files, e.g. the one above?

Matthias