Cutting off textscan after a character
Question
I'm working on a function in MATLAB that reads input from a file. So far (after reading a bit here about scanf
vulnerabilities) I decided to use fgets
to get each line, and then textscan
to extract the words, which will always be of the format 'chars' including the apostrophes. So, I'm using:
fid = fopen('file.txt');
tline = fgets(fid);
textscan(tline, '''%s''');
However, I want to allow people to have comments, using the % character. How do I cut off textscan
so that
'word' 'anotherword' % 'comment'
doesn't return comment?
Solution
fid = fopen('file.txt');
tline = fgets(fid);
pct = find(tline=='%');
tline(pct(1)-1:end)=[]; % deletes tline from first instance of '%' onward.
textscan(tline, '''%s''');
Note that the above will cut off after any %
at all in the line, even if it is in quotes.
If you want to allow the character % in your quoted string yous you have to do more logic on testing for comment % before deleting rest of tline. Look at the strcmp
and findstr
functions which may be useful.
OTHER TIPS
After doing some more reading around while debugging, I found a more straightforward way to do this.
textscan(tline, '''%s''', 'commentStyle', '%');