how to read and create column vectors from this txt file (attached)?

[Rik]

What functions did you try?

[EM geo]

fileID = fopen('output_nostri.txt');
C = textscan(fileID,'%d-%d:%s %s');
fclose(fileID);

@Rik

[Rik]

Matlab by default treats the comma as a separator, not as part of a number. Since your columns seem to be alligned with fixed-width fields, it might make sense to parse the lines yourself by first reading the lines as char arrays, skipping the first 3 lines, replacing the commas by periods, and then using textscan on that. It might be easiest to read the date separately from the numeric values.

Answer 1

[dpb]

A fixedWidthImportOptions object can help here altho the heading row doesn't quite line up to make it as trivial as could otherwise be...

opt=fixedWidthImportOptions('NumVariables',10);                 % create base import object w 10 variables
opt.VariableWidths=[8 10*ones(1,9)];                            % set field width to match file
opt.DataLines=[4 inf];                                          % data starts row 4
tout=readtable('output_nostri.txt',opt);                        % import data; will be cellstr arrays
for i=2:10                                                      % convert the numeric data
  tout.(tout.Properties.VariableNames{i})=str2double(strrep(tout{:,i},',','.'));
end
tout.Var1=datetime(tout.Var1,'InputFormat','MMM-yyyy');         % and the time

I presume local settings will handle the month name abbreviations; the above fails on all that aren't english translations here; I would presume that comes from a locale setting for other places but I've never had the opportunity to test to know if that is so or not.

Also leaves variable names Var1 thru Var10; the column headings in line two don't exactly align with the data columns so to read it would have to do a second read of that line...