write a row from excel to a text file

How can i write a string row ( not English ) from excel to notepad or wordpad. Is it possible in Matlab?

I have attached a sample excel sheet

[Stephen23]

"How can i write a string row ( not English ) from excel to notepad or wordpad. Is it possible in Matlab?"

No: both notepad and wordpad are compiled binary applications, which cannot be "written to". Unless, of course, you want to destroy your application so that it cannot run anymore.

Or did you actually want to ask if you could write to a text file, which is a standard and very common file type (and which exists completely independently of any specific application)?

[Elysi Cochin]

ya, i wanted to write it to a text file. I tried the below code, but what got printed was some symbols. How can i write the string (in the excel sheet) to a text file

[Stephen23]

"I tried the below code, but what got printed was some symbols."

Symbols is exactly what your file contains. The only two non-empty cells are these two:

These are the 30th and 31st letters of the Malayalam alphabet. I even went to the effort of checking them inside the XLSX file, here they are saved inside sharedStrings.xml:

Lets try Chris LaPierre's code and see what happens:

tbl = readtable("Book1.xlsx",'ReadVariableNames',false,"TextType","string");
writetable(tbl, "Book1.txt","WriteVariableNames",false,"Delimiter","\t");
str = fileread( "Book1.txt")

str = 
    'പ	ത
     '

So far everything seems to be working exactly as expected. What specific problem do you have?

Note that some earlier MATLAB versions had only limited Unicode support: what MATLAB version are you using?

[Elysi Cochin]

Sir will this work for Matlab 2018a? I'm not getting the output

Two arrows (-> ->) are getting displayed in the text file for me

How can i resolve it?

[Stephen23]

"Two arrows (-> ->) are getting displayed in the text file for me"

What application (i.e. text editor) are you using to look at this file?

[Elysi Cochin]

"What application (i.e. text editor) are you using to look at this file?"

notepad

When i use the below statement after writing to txt file,

str = fileread( "Book1.txt")

the output in command window, i get is
str =

    '
     '

[Stephen23]

I suspect that R2018a is unable to handle all Unicode correctly, but I have no way to check this. Perhaps Chris LaPierre can help further on clarifying this.

As an aside, I strongly recommend that you use a robust text editor, for example Notepad++.

[Elysi Cochin]

Thank you sir for your suggestions

Answer 1

[Cris LaPierre]

It's possible, but you have to bring the data into MATLAB first, then write it to a text file.

• https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/ways-to-import-spreadsheets.html
• https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/write-to-delimited-data-files.html

[Elysi Cochin]

ya, i read the excel sheet, and tried writing it to notepad, but it showed error,

Error using fprintf
Function is not defined for 'cell' inputs.

so i converted cell2mat and tried writing it to notepad

but what display was some sort of symbols

Below is the code i used,

[num, str, raw] = xlsread('Book1.xlsx');
fid = fopen('out.txt', 'wt');
fprintf(fid, '%s', cell2mat(raw));
fclose(fid);

[Cris LaPierre]

Try using readtable and writetable (see the links I already shared). They are preferred in this scenario.

d=readtable("Book1.xlsx",'ReadVariableNames',false,"TextType","string")
writetable(d,"Book1.txt","WriteVariableNames",false,"Delimiter","\t")

[Elysi Cochin]

Sir will this work for Matlab 2018a? I'm not getting the output

[Cris LaPierre]

Doesn't sound like it. You hadn't indicated what version of MATLAB you were using, so I used my version, which is R2021a.

You may need to specify the encoding. Try using this for your write command.

writetable(d,"Book1.txt","WriteVariableNames",false,"Delimiter","\t",'Encoding','UTF-8')

For more details, see the "Write Foreign-Language Characters to Text Files" section of the R2018a writetable documentation.

[Elysi Cochin]

Great Sir, thank you so much. Thanks a lot, now it works perfectly