importing selected columns of text files with headers where the missing value is a dot

I have many files that are large where the first row is a header row. The files are tab delimited and I want to import only selected columns. All theses vectors are numeric but the missing value is a dot (.) . I want to import these selected columns where the name of each vector is the name of the header and I want my vectors to be numeric. Any clue about how to do it?

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

v=importdata('your_file.txt')

[wesso Dadoyan]

it is taking the data as cell which will deprive me from naming the vectors after the 1st row. For example. I am getting under v.textdata:

'ENTITY'  'CALL8786'  'RCFDA000'  'RCFDA001'  'RCFDA002'  'RCFDA003'
'37'  '2'  '0'  '0'  '0'  '.'
'242'  '2'  '0'  '0'  '0'  '.'