title: Is it possible to have a variable range and columns using csvRead in Scilab 5.5.2
body: <p>I am a fairly novice, self-taught programmer using Scilab. I have .csv files that I want to read. They are mixed text and numerical values, and have a variable numbers of columns and rows. The part of the file I am interested in has a fixed amount of columns but not rows. I can skip the first part using the header argument but also have cells at the bottom that I do not need. An example of what it could look like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>DATA,1,0,3,3960.4,3236,3373,-132
  DATA,1,0,4,4544.5,3530,3588,-76
  RANDOM TEXT,0
  INFO,1,0,#+BHO0 _:WRF&amp;-11,S%00-0-03-1       
  INFO,2,1,#*BHO0 _8WRF&amp;-11,NAS%00-0-15-1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am only interested in the lines that start with DATA. If I try to run csvRead without removing the lines below I get this error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Warning: Inconsistency found in the columns. At line 4993, found 2 columns 
  while the previous had 8.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I currently have a program that will read the file and manipulate it as required but I have to go into each file and delete the bottom rows. Is there a way to get around this? </p>
  
  <p>My current program looks something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>D = uigetfile([".csv"],"path", "Choose a file name", %t);
  filename = fullfile(D);
  sub = ["DATA" "0"];
  
  //Import data
  data = csvRead(filename, ',', [], 'string', sub, [], [], 34);
  edit(filename)
  //determine # of rows
  data_size = size(data);
  limit = data_size(1);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>