How to read data from a .dat file row by row

A very large data file with .dat is to be read and loaded which contains a first row consisting of some characters as the head and a table containing 10,000 rows times 10,000 columns, whose data is in cell form.

I now want to restore the first row as a vector, say 'head',each entry being a string of characters, and the rest is a matrix A, each of whose elements are characters but in cell format originally.

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

If the .dat is in a well structured text format, then:

ncol = 10000;
sep = ','   ; %could be '\t' or other separator
hfmt = repmat('%s', 1, ncol);
cfmt = repmat('%f', 1, ncol);

fid = fopen('YourFileNameGoesHere.dat', 'rt');

head = textscan(fid, hfmt, 1, 'Delimiter', sep, 'Whitespace', '');
A = textscan(fid, cfmt, 'Delimiter', sep, 'Whitespace', '');

fclose(fid);

You would need to adjust the formats and separator.