Completed exercise 2.1

readbuoydata.m

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+% Declare a function that takes a signle argument (the file path) and returns a
+% 'data' object containing the data parsed from the file object. A count
+% integer is also returned with the number of entries read from file.
+function [data, count] = readbuoydata(datafile)
+
+    % Create a file object with the path provided by the 'datafile' variable
+    fid = fopen(datafile,'r');
+    % Read first two header lines of file so that they are ignored in
+    % processing below.
+    tline = fgetl(fid);
+    tline = fgetl(fid);
+
+    % Parse each line of the file from line 3 onwards and store in variable 'A'
+    % first argument specifies the file object.
+    % second arguments specifies the data type to expect for each of the 10
+    % elements per line.
+    % the third argument specifies to read 10 elements per line, and to read
+    % until the end of the file.
+    [A,count] = fscanf(fid,'%d %d %d %d %d %f %f %d %f %f',[10 inf]);
+
+    % Creates a member of the data object that contains dates in the 'serial
+    % date number' format
+    data.date = datenum([A(1:5,:); zeros(1,size(A,2))]')';
+    data.Hs = A(6,:); % significant wave height
+    data.Tp = A(7,:); % peak period
+    data.Dp = A(8,:); % peak period direction
+    data.Ta = A(9,:); % average period
+    data.SST = A(10,:); % sea surface temperature
+
+    % Close the file 
+    fclose(fid);