MATLAB help - searching text for specific words

[BakerIregular]

Hello! I stumbled upon these forums and it looks like this is a good place to get an answer to this question. I am an undergrad physics major doing biophysics research and writing a program to help with data analysis. The first step it to write a program in MATLAB that reads in a text file, will search for keywords, and store the strings after those keywords.
Example, the file would look like:


Test
Test Name
Group
Group 1
Group
Group2
Subject
Subject1
Property1


I need to look through this file. When I get to test, I read the test name, store it, then when it gets to group, read the group name, store it, look for subjects, read subject name and some other properties, store them, then look for another subject, then for another group, then for another test. My issue is reading the strings looking for these keywords, then storing the words after them. I think the textscan function is what I need to use but I am new to MATLAB programming and not sure how exactly it works. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[Wrichik Basu]

This can be done assuming that the file format is strictly what you have written (the important factor is the presence of %n).

First the code:

opts = delimitedTextImportOptions('Delimiter','%n');
A = readmatrix('text.txt',opts); %read the text file
A = convertCharsToStrings(A); %before this, A is a cell array

Basically you are telling Matlab that as soon as it encounters a new line character (%n), it will read the consecutive string into another cell of the matrix A. Now, A is a cell array. So, convert it to a string array.

Now you can compare the elements of A as required using strcmpi function:

for i=1:size(A)
    if(1 == strcmpi(B(i), "group"))
        %do necessary operations on B(i+1) and B(i+2)
        %as required
        i = i+1;
        %change 1 to 2 or 3 if you have operated
        %on i+2 and i+3, so on...
    end
end

The documentations are as follows:
readmatrix function:
https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/readmatrix.htmlUsing opts:
https://in.mathworks.com/help/matla...d40-4b04-addc-3a5de11f672a_sep_btx_238-1-optshttps://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.io.text.delimitedtextimportoptions.htmlImportant point:
Instead of readmatrix, this work could be done using dlmread function. But as of R2019a, MATLAB is requesting users not to use it.