Parsing a Large Text File into Sections

Hi Amanda,

This should work for you. It just reads the input file one line at a time and prints that line to an output file. If it hits a new "section", it makes a new output file named by that section.

fidIn = fopen('inputFile.txt','r');
oldFirstChars = 'somethingtostart';
fidOut = [];
while 1
    tline = fgetl(fidIn);
    if ~ischar(tline), break, end % Handle the end of the input file

        % Get the string up to the first space
        newFirstChars = regexp(tline, '\d+','match','once');

        % If it's a new "section", make a new file
        if ~strcmp(oldFirstChars, newFirstChars)
            if ~isempty(fidOut)
                % Close the old file first
                fclose(fidOut);                      
            end 
            fidOut = fopen(['outputFile' newFirstChars '.txt'],'w');
            oldFirstChars = newFirstChars;
        end

        % Just print out the line that we just read to the output file
        fprintf(fidOut, '%s\r\n',tline);
    end
  % Clean up any open files
  fclose(fidIn);
  fclose(fidOut);

Having a slight matrix dimensions error.

Thanks Sven.

Everything works great!!!

Thanks a lot.

Solved the matrix dimensions -- using a plain ascii file. Success in getting the output files.

Only Problem which probably I didn't make clear (been brainstorming too long)

I'm trying to group the file based on the first number of the column:

Output File 1

1 32 32 34

1 23 22 21

Output File 2

2 23 12 11

2 11 11 11

So grouping the data based on the run 1 or run 2 in separate files.

Thanks, Amanda