how to properly textscan

Can someone please fully explain textscan function as i am new to matlab and am unsure what some of the code already on this forum means?

I am trying to make a search tool that relates a user input to a row in an imported table.

I want the user to type an input and using that input, the script relates it to a previous matrix to display that row's information.

eg; if my table is:

age initials gender

25 am F

32 dp m

and I type as my input "am"

I want to text scan in my table for "am" and display: 25 / F for exapmle??

[Michal]

If you have the table already imported you do not need to use textscan. Provided that the user always inputs initials you can find the corresponding info like this:

ind = find(strcmp(t.initials,user_input)); % locate the initials that the user wants; t is the table
if ~isempty(ind) % checking whether the initials were found at all
    t(ind,:) % show the row that contains the initials
end

You would typically use textscan to scan through files or chunks of text.