Reading variables from a text file in Matlab

The command:

load

by itself, loads all the variables saved in the file matlab.mat. If the file that contains the variable data is named differently than matlab.mat, use the command:

load fname

which will retrieve the variables from the binary file fname.mat.

To read in variable data from a text file (ascii) use the command:

load fname.xyz

which reads the file fname.xyz. This file can be an ASCII file with of numeric data, arranged in m lines with n variables in each line.

Example:

If the file sample.dat contains four lines of numeric text

	1.1	1.2	1.3
	2.1	2.2	2.3
	3.1	3.2	3.3
	4.1	4.2	4.3

The command load sample.dat would produce a 4-by-3 matrix named sample in the workspace.