You can ask textscan
to do that for you:
n = 4; %number of output values
L = size(lines,1);
value = zeros(L,n);
for ii=1:L,
value(ii,:) = cell2mat(textscan(lines(ii,:), '%*s%f')).';
end
now for 4 lines in your example it produces:
>> format shortE
>> value
value =
3.4140e-04 0 0 0
7.2390e-04 0 0 1.8750e-09
1.7880e-02 0 0 9.9650e-07
2.5860e-02 0 0 1.9920e-06