Reading text files (readtable, textscan) in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Reading Text Files with readtable and textscan in MATLAB

📖 Scenario: You have a text file named students.txt that contains student names and their scores separated by commas. You want to read this data into MATLAB to analyze it.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to read text files using readtable and textscan functions in MATLAB to extract and display student names and scores.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a text file named students.txt with given content

Use readtable to read the file into a table

Use textscan to read the file into separate variables

Display the student names and scores

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Reading data from text files is common when working with exported data from other programs or sensors.

💼 Career

Many jobs require processing data files, and knowing how to read and parse text files is a key skill for data analysis and engineering.

1

Create the text file students.txt

Create a text file named students.txt with these exact lines:
Alice,85
Bob,90
Charlie,78

MATLAB

% Create the file students.txt with the given content
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use fopen to create the file, fprintf to write lines, and fclose to close the file.

2

Read the file using readtable

Use readtable to read students.txt into a table called studentTable with comma as the delimiter.

MATLAB

fid = fopen('students.txt', 'w');
fprintf(fid, 'Alice,85\nBob,90\nCharlie,78\n');
fclose(fid);
% Read the file into studentTable using readtable
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use readtable with the 'Delimiter' option set to ','.

3

Read the file using textscan

Open students.txt for reading with fopen. Use textscan with format '%s %d' and delimiter ',' to read names and scores into variables names and scores. Close the file.

MATLAB

fid = fopen('students.txt', 'w');
fprintf(fid, 'Alice,85\nBob,90\nCharlie,78\n');
fclose(fid);
studentTable = readtable('students.txt', 'Delimiter', ',');
% Open file and read with textscan into names and scores
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use textscan with format '%s %d' and delimiter ','. Remember to close the file.

4

Display the student names and scores

Use a for loop with variable i from 1 to the length of names. Inside the loop, print each student's name and score using fprintf in the format: Name: Alice, Score: 85.

MATLAB

fid = fopen('students.txt', 'w');
fprintf(fid, 'Alice,85\nBob,90\nCharlie,78\n');
fclose(fid);
studentTable = readtable('students.txt', 'Delimiter', ',');
fid = fopen('students.txt', 'r');
data = textscan(fid, '%s %d', 'Delimiter', ',');
names = data{1};
scores = data{2};
fclose(fid);
% Print each student's name and score using a for loop
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use fprintf inside a for loop to print each name and score.