Read txt file with comma decimal separator in MATLAB [duplicate]

Answer 1

There is no easy built-in way of doing this (surprisingly!). You'll want to read in the entire file, then do a string replacement, and then convert the result into numbers.

% Read file in as a series of strings
fid = fopen('data.txt', 'rb');
strings = textscan(fid, '%s', 'Delimiter', '');
fclose(fid);

% Replace all commas with decimal points
decimal_strings = regexprep(strings{1}, ',', '.');

% Convert to doubles and join all rows together
data = cellfun(@str2num, decimal_strings, 'uni', 0);
data = cat(1, data{:});

Answer 2

Another possibility is simply replacing commas with periods in your file, then load the new file in MATLAB.

On Linux or Mac, we can use sed or tr UNIX utilities:

$ cat file.dat | tr ',' '.' > file2.dat

On Windows, we can use PowerShell:

PS> gc file.dat | % { $_ -replace ',', '.' } | sc -encoding ascii file2.dat

Eitherway, we can load the new file in MATLAB simply as:

>> load -ascii file2.dat
>> disp(file2)
    1.6000    2.0000    6.5000    5.0000
         0    1.0000    4.0000    2.5000

Answer 3

A quick way suggested by this MathWorks Central thread is to use strrep:

data=strrep(data,'.',',')

So first read your data as strings, then replace commas with dots and use str2num to go to doubles.