Skip header and comments within file

Hi everybody, I am pretty new to Matlab.. I am trying to read a .dat file skipping the header and the comment lines within the file. The file looks like this.

#   (EXCLUDING parts overlapped by quadrics)
#
# Dose units are eV/g per primary history
# Number of voxels in x
#  3 1 3
# Voxels size dx
#   1.00000E+01  1.00000E+00  1.00000E+01
# The granularity used to compute the voxels mass was:
# 10
#
# For plotting purposes
#   the low end and the middle point of each voxel
#
# xLow(cm) : xMiddle(cm) : yLow(cm) : yMiddle(cm) : zLow(cm) : zMiddle(cm) : dose (eV/g) : +-2sigma : voxel mass (g) : Pure(+)/Overlapped(-)
# zVoxIndex=1 
# yVoxIndex=1 
0.00000E+00  5.00000E+00  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E+00  2.52392E+00 4.9E-04  1.19000E+02 + 
1.00000E+01  1.50000E+01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E+00  2.64684E+00 5.0E-04  1.19000E+02 + 
2.00000E+01  2.50000E+01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E+00  2.52420E+00 4.9E-04  1.19000E+02 + 

# zVoxIndex=2 
# yVoxIndex=1 
0.00000E+00  5.00000E+00  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  1.00000E+01  1.50000E+01  2.64757E+00 5.0E-04  1.19000E+02 + 
1.00000E+01  1.50000E+01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  1.00000E+01  1.50000E+01  2.65801E+00 1.6E-02  1.20480E-01 + 
2.00000E+01  2.50000E+01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  1.00000E+01  1.50000E+01  2.64726E+00 5.0E-04  1.19000E+02 + 

# zVoxIndex=3 
# yVoxIndex=1 
0.00000E+00  5.00000E+00  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  2.00000E+01  2.50000E+01  2.52385E+00 4.9E-04  1.19000E+02 + 
1.00000E+01  1.50000E+01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  2.00000E+01  2.50000E+01  2.64743E+00 5.0E-04  1.19000E+02 + 
2.00000E+01  2.50000E+01  0.00000E+00  5.00000E-01  2.00000E+01  2.50000E+01  2.52422E+00 4.9E-04  1.19000E+02 +

I would like to have only numbers. I have tried with this that works for the first three lines after the header (the first 19 lines) but I cannot manage to read the other lines without the comments.

FID=fopen('tallyVoxelDoseDistrib.dat');
datacell = textscan(FID, '%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%s', 3, 'HeaderLines', 19); 
fclose(FID);

Thank you very much in advance for your help!

Answer 1

[Matt Sprague]

Since the header and comments all start with '#', you can set that character as the comment style to skip those lines and only read in the numerical data.

datacell = textscan(FID, '%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%s','CommentStyle','#');