Nested textscan statements

Question

The following two statements read the first line from an input file (fid) and parse said line into strings delimited by whitespace.

a = textscan(fid,'%s',1,'Delimiter','\n');
b = textscan(a{1}{1},'%s');

I would like to know if this action can be accomplished in a single statement, having a form similar to the following (which is syntactically invalid).

b = textscan(textscan(fid,'%s',1,'Delimiter','\n'),'%s');

Thanks.

Answer 1

Instead of

a = textscan(fid, '%s', 1, 'Delimiter', '\n');

you can use

a = fgetl(fid);

That will return the next line in fid as a string (the newline character at the end is stripped). You can then split that line into white-space separated chunks as follows:

b = regexp(a, '\s*', 'split');

Combined:

b = regexp(fgetl(fid), '\s*', 'split');

Note that this is not 100% equivalent to your code, since using textscan adds another cell-layer (representing different lines in the file). That's not a problem, though, simply use

b = {regexp(fgetl(fid), '\s*', 'split')};

if you need that extra cell-layer.