Assuming the columns in your text file are separated by single whitespace characters your format specification should look like this:
A = textscan(filename,'%f %s %f');
A
now contains the complete file content. To obtain the first column:
first_col = A{:,1};
Alternatively, you can tell textscan
to skip the unneeded fields with the *
option:
first_col = cell2mat( textscan(filename, '%f %*s %*f') );
This returns only the first column.