I had a similar question. but what i am trying now is to read files in .txt format into matlab. My problem is with the headers. Manytimes due to errors the system rewrites the headers in the middle of file and then matlab cannot read the file. IS there a way to skip it? I know i can skip reading some characters if i know what the character is.

here is the code i am using.

[c,pathc]=uigetfile({'*.txt'},'Select the data','V:\data);
file=[pathc c];
data= dlmread(file, ',', 1,4);

this way i let the user pick the file. My files are huge typically [ 86400 125 ] so naturally it has 125 header fields or more depends on files.

Thanks

Because the files are so big i cannot copy , but its in format like

day time col1 col2 col3 col4 ...............................
2/3/2010 0:10 3.4 4.5 5.6 4.4 ...............................
..................................................................
..................................................................

and so on