My initial thought was that you should use textscan for your problem. Unfortunately, textscan will stop processing if it encounters data that it can not convert, as opposed to the NaNs that you want.

You can get your result using a couple of splits:

Create some sample data:

>> str = sprintf(’123 | 456 | 6.4|asdd\n124 | 457 | 6.8|asdd\n125 | 458 | 7.0|qwerty’)
str =
123 | 456 | 6.4|asdd
124 | 457 | 6.8|asdd
125 | 458 | 7.0|qwerty

Split the data on newlines to find the rows:

>> rows = regexp(str, ‘\n’, ’split’)
rows =
[1×20 char] [1×20 char] [1×22 char]

Now split the rows into individual cells:

>> cells = regexp(rows, ‘\s*\|\s*’, ’split’)
cells =
{1×4 cell} {1×4 cell} {1×4 cell}

Since cells is now a 1×3 cell of 1×4 cells, vertically concatenate them to recreate the original shape of the data:

>> cells = vertcat(cells{:})
cells =
‘123′ ‘456′ ‘6.4′ ‘asdd’
‘124′ ‘457′ ‘6.8′ ‘asdd’
‘125′ ‘458′ ‘7.0′ ‘qwerty’

Now str2double will do the rest of the work:

>> str2double(cells)
ans =
123.0000 456.0000 6.4000 NaN
124.0000 457.0000 6.8000 NaN
125.0000 458.0000 7.0000 NaN

-=>J

But how do you automatically have an numeric array after parsing lines like:

123 | 456 | 6.4|asdd
124 | 457 | 6.8|asdd

result should be something like:

[123 456 6.4 NA; 124 457 6.8 NA; ]

Rob.

Please contact technical support. This question is off-topic.

Thank you.
–Loren

Look in the document, for example here to see information on functions such as urlread.

–Loren

Because, i have no idea how grab web page text(html) data in matlab for string manipulations?

See the documentation here.

In addition to regexp, have a look at strtok to see if that helps you out.

–Loren