[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #58008] textscan: literals are managed differently depending on delimiters

[Philip Nienhuis]

Follow-up Comment #7, bug #58008 (project octave):

FWIW, my experience with textscan (in Octave and in Matlab) is that even for
just-above-simple text file formats, considerable experimentation may be
required to get it right. Sometimes so much that I write dedicated scripts or
programs rather than trying to invoke textscan.
The clever trick that Mike came up with fits perfectly in this picture, even
if it just works around a bug. I'd just advise "if it works for you, it
works".

Years ago we tried to find out exactly how delimiters, whitespace, endofline
and literals + their default values would influence each other and in what
priority, but we never managed to come up with a definitive "script" or
"flowchart". To that end rigorous reverse-engineering is required but this
volunteer project simply lacks time.
So IMO textscan is a still a bit of a black box, or a very dark grey one at
that ;-)
That said Matlab has greatly improved their version, but also added a lot of
bells and whistles that IMO mainly add to the confusion.

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