[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #61313] importdata fails on reading an ascii file

[Markus Mützel]

Update of bug #61313 (project octave):

                  Status:                    None => Confirmed              

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Follow-up Comment #1:

I can confirm that this doesn't work.

Fwiw in Matlab R2021a:

>> a=importdata('data.txt', ' ', 1)

a = 

        data: [-21.2280 -0.9760 -979.6600 2520 -4060 560 -602096 -13684
-27463788 6.0006e+05 35.1642 1.8442e+06]
    textdata: {2x1 cell}

>> a.textdata

ans = 

    't (s)           acc_x (mg)      acc_y (mg)      accy_z (mg)    w_x (mdps)
     w_y (mdps)      w_z (mdps)      b_x (mG)        b_y (mG)       b_z (mG)  
     p (Pa)          T (deg C)       h (m)         '
    '03:00:21.550'


IIUC, `importdata` with ' ' as a separator calls `dlmread` with empty
separator to read the numeric portion of the data. That corresponds to calling
`dlmread` like this:

dlmread ('data.txt', "", 1, 1, "emptyvalue", NA);


My guess is that `dlmread` tries to guess a separator in this case, finds ':'
before any other choices (",:; \t"), and continues using that as the
separator.
That messes up reading the file.

If you know the structure of the file you'd like to read beforehand, you could
use something like the following as a workaround:

fid = fopen('data.txt');
a = textscan(fid, '%s %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f %f', 'HeaderLines', 1,
'Delimiter', ' ')
fclose(fid);



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