[FIXED] How to read CSV files with GNU Octave if the delimiter is ;?

Issue

I have an .csv file made in Excel and that Excel uses ; as delimiter. I don't like that, but I cannot change it.

So I have to accept it. I want to read that .csv file in GNU Octave, but I can't really do it because the float numbers inside the .csv file is separated with , e.g 15,25 and not separated with . e.g 15.25 because in Excel, it assumes that 15.25 is a text string and 15,25 is a number. Yes, I know, it's weird.

If I change all , to . in my .csv file, then I can read the .csv file with dlmread or csvread. But in this case, I don't want to change , to . because that's a standard Excel configuration.

So my question is:

If you have a .csv file were the float numbers are displayed with ,. How can you read that .csv file in GNU Octave then?

Solution

For a much more flexible csv reader than the default matlab-compatible csvread and dlmread, use the csv2cell function from the io pkg. If you haven't used packages before, this is how you would do that:

pkg install io -forge   % install io package if you haven't already
pkg load io             % load it

Then use csv2cell to read the values as strings into a cell (declaring ; as the desired delimiter); then use strrep to replace , to . in your strings; and then finally use str2double to convert those strings to numbers.

You can do this with the following one-liner:

str2double( strrep( csv2cell( 'testo.csv', ';' ), ',', '.' ) )

You could also wrap this into an anonymous function:

read_my_csv = @( myfile ) str2double( strrep( csv2cell( myfile, ';' ), ',', '.' ) );
Data = read_my_csv( 'data.csv' );

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PS. Tux the penguin added for extra perfection, as requested.

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Answered By - Tasos Papastylianou

Answer Checked By - Pedro (PHPFixing Volunteer)