Reading first column of a .csv file

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Hi everyone, I'm having some difficulty getting the information I'm looking for extracted. I would like to pull everything from the first column from rows 2 to the end. When I use txtread I extract the entire document, I've tried a few other read functions however they produced errors. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I've attached the .csv file and the script producing the .csv file. Thanks in advanced and hope you all have a great weekend. Zack
fu=['https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datasets/s-and-p-500-companies/master/data/constituents-financials.csv'];
urlwrite(fu,'Symbols.csv')
symbols=textread('symbols.csv','%s');

Accepted Answer

Star Strider
Star Strider on 30 Aug 2015
I would use xlsread:
[~,symbols] = xlsread('Symbols.csv', 'A:A');
This imports a (497x1) cell of the symbols in Column A, plus the column header ‘Symbol’, so you may only want to use the last 496.

More Answers (3)

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 30 Aug 2015
fid = fopen('symbols.csv', 'rt');
datacell = textscan(fid, '%[^,]%*[^\n]', 'HeaderLines', 1);
fclose(fid);
symbols = datacell{1};

Zack Bayhan
Zack Bayhan on 30 Aug 2015
Awesome thanks for the help once again, Star Strider! Worked like a charm, and was able to drop the header out so hopefully now I'll be able to use this data.

Sahil Negi
Sahil Negi on 18 Oct 2021
You can use importdata as shown below:
symbols = importdata('Symbols.csv');
column_1 = symbols.data(:, 1);
This should get your first column without the header.

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