How can I improve the readability of a text file produced with writetable?

Hi guys!

I want to export a matlab table as .txt file by using the function writetable but I've the problem that the exported data are "disordered" in the new file.

My output is:

I would like to achieve something very similar to matlab table, i.e. aligned columns (note that the column of "name" is empty, so I would like to fill each cell with a string "empty"):

Here my piece code:

clear all; close all; clc;

file_name_asteroids = 'NEOs_asteroids.csv';

opts = delimitedTextImportOptions("NumVariables", 11);

% Specify range and delimiter
opts.DataLines = [2, Inf];
opts.Delimiter = ",";

% Specify column names and types
opts.VariableNames = ["pdes", "name", "epoch", "a", "e", "i", "om", "w", "ma", "q", "ad"];
opts.VariableTypes = ["string", "string", "double", "double", "double", "double", "double", "double", "double", "double", "double"];

% Specify file level properties
opts.ExtraColumnsRule = "ignore";
opts.EmptyLineRule = "read";

% Specify variable properties
opts = setvaropts(opts, ["pdes", "name"], "WhitespaceRule", "preserve");
opts = setvaropts(opts, ["pdes", "name"], "EmptyFieldRule", "auto");

% Import the data
Ast_data = readtable(file_name_asteroids,opts);

%data filtering
i_max = 10; % (deg) 
e_max = 0.1;
q_min = 0.9;  %(AU)
ad_max = 1.1; % (AU)


Ast_cond = Ast_data.i <= i_max & Ast_data.e <= e_max &...
                Ast_data.q >= q_min & Ast_data.ad <= ad_max;

Ast_data_filtered = Ast_data(Ast_cond,:);

%data export
Output_file_name = 'NEOs_asteroids_filtered.txt';
writetable(Ast_data_filtered,Output_file_name,...
    "WriteVariableNames",true,"Encoding",'UTF-8',"Delimiter","tab");

Can you help me to obtain the desired table and to fill the empty column?

Answer 1

[Enrico Gambini]

Hi, I think that the export worked well. If you want to increase the readability of the textfile i think you should set less decimals in your numeric values (i.e., reduce precision): the column names will be more "centered" with respect to values.

To fill the column you can do the following.

Ast_data_filtered.name(1:end)={"empty"};

[Giuseppe]

Hi @Enrico Gambini, thanks for your answer. I need all the decimal digits. Isn't there a way to automatically detect and fill the empty cells during the import of table with readable function?

[Enrico Gambini]

I think that you can set "FillValue","empty" in setvaropts