How to read from a *.txt file to assign variables and paths

I would like to read from a text file that has the format of the following:

BASEPATH="'/Users/asdf/xyz'"

FILENAME1="'HELLO.txt'"

FILENAME2="'GOODBYE.txt'"

XVALUE="1"

YVALUE="2"

The purpose is to use this as an input file to import other files, HELLO.txt and GOODBYE.txt (in the same directory - /Users/asdf/xyz), and assign values for a few variables (XVALUE = 1 and YVALUE = 2).

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

[Matt Kindig]

Easiest way is to parse with regular expressions and read into an output structure with named fields.

 %read in file
  str = fileread('/path/to/your/file.txt');
  %extract fields and values
  pieces = regexp(str, '(?<field>\w+)=(?<value>[^\n]+)', 'names');
  out = struct();  %your variables
  for k=1:length(pieces),
     field = pieces(k).field;
     val = pieces(k).value;
     tf= ismember(val, char([34 39]));    %remove " and ' from string
     val = strtrim(val(~tf));    %also remove spaces
     %try to convert to double.  If successful, use converted value,
     %otherwise use original (string) value
     valn = str2double(val);
     if ~isnan(valn), %conversion successful, use as numeric
        val = valn;
     end
     %add to output structure
     out.(field) = val;
end

[Samuel]

wow... Thank you very much! works great

[Kundan]

I am also dealing with somewhat similar situation.

I have around 50,000 files in a directory. File name format is like 20130724ABCD.txt (where letters stand for yyyy, mm, dd and text is for location).

ABCD is unique( e.g. COLO, NEBR, KANS), and I want to concatenate contents of file in a file ABCD.

How would I do it? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Matt Kindig]

To clarify, you want to combine together the contents of all files which have the same 4-letter combo immediately prior to the file extension? If so, this is a bit different than the posted question, so you're better off starting a new question in this forum.

[Matt Kindig]

In particular, there are several Linux tools that would probably be faster and better for this task. Also, this can probably be done quite efficiently in Perl.