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0 commentsI have to confess to feeling a bit stupid. I have been struggling with MATLAB for weeks now, trying to get it to read in my data files so I can automate my analyses. My data is in a tab-delimited file and looks something like:
Doc1 Doc2 Doc3 Doc4 Doc1 100 76 18 91 Doc2 76 100 22 35 Doc3 18 22 100 65 Doc4 91 34 65 100
This is not too dissimilar from the labelled diagram, part of the MATLAB documentation on data importing. Except that, if you look at the table below it, which describes which functions to use, they don’t have a function with a similar example to their labelled diagram. Early on I thought I should be able to use dlmread, which allows you specify rows/columns for starting points or a range. My idea was just to have a range which excluded the non-numeric troublesome labels. No matter what I did, though, I could not get it to work. It was frustrating, because I could paste the data into the Import Wizard and that could handle the data fine. I wrote people, I researched on the web, and I tried all sorts of things.
Eventually, I came full-circle back to dlmread and experimented by making a small data file with unrelated data in it. That worked fine. So I then copied half of one of my data tables into the test file and tried that. That also worked fine. I copied the whole data table into the test file and used dlmread on it. It worked fine! What was the difference between the two identical data files other than their filenames? When I uncovered the answer to that, I kicked myself. My data files were generated years ago and stored on my Mac OS 9-based laptop. My laptop and the data have since migrated to Apple’s swoopy BSD-based UNIX goodness and that’s the environment that MATLAB runs under. So… Have you guessed the problem? Yes, it was linefeeds! The data files had original Mac linefeeds and MATLAB wanted UNIX linefeeds. D’oh! It just goes to reaffirm that the things you don’t see can really hurt you.
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