Question

Hi, i am working with MATLAB. I have a text file from which I have to read in my data. So far i have this in my code.

fid = fopen('ecgnormaloff.txt', 'r');

data = textscan(fid,'%f')

According to all the websites, this should be enough to read in my points, however, I get this as my output

data =

1×1 cell array

{0×1 double}

>>

And when I try to access my data, there is nothing. I do not want to actually attach my text file, since this is homework, and will further be used in a project. so I will simply try to show you what the text file looks like. I hope the next chunk is helpful to visualize it (It is data points for an ecg trace).

Lead Number 1 Time Step .02 Data Points 6001

number

number

number

....

(there are all floating point numbers!)

(theres 6001 data points, therefore the numbers continue onto column 6002 because of the header.)

>>

>>

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Solution for your problem is provided below, please comment if any doubts:

There is nothing wrong with your code but the format you try to print is not correct to display the read data. It is because the “textscan()” function read the data into a cell array. The cell array will not display just by removing the semi colon after the “textscan()” function. You have to use “celldisp(data)” to display the contents you read into the data variable. The normal printing will print only the size of the cell array.

Thus if you need to display the cell array data you read to data variable, it needed to add an extra command “celldisp(data)” as given below:

fid = fopen('ecgnormaloff.txt', 'r');

data = textscan(fid,'%f')

celldisp(data)

If you need to read the data into normal two dimensional array use:

data = fscanf(fid, '%f')