title: MATLAB vs. GNU Octave Textscan disparity
body: <p>I wish to read some data from a .dat file without saving the file first. In order to do so, my code looks as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>urlsearch= 'http://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8=&amp;object_id=2005+PM';
  url= 'http://minorplanetcenter.net/tmp/2005_PM.dat';
  
  urlmidstep=urlread(urlsearch);
  urldata=urlread(url);
  
  received= textscan(urldata , '%5s %7s %1s %1s %1s %17s %12s %12s %9s %6s %6s %3s ' ,'delimiter', '', 'whitespace', '');
  data_received = received{:}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><code>urlmidstep</code>'s function is just to do a "search", in order to be able to create the temporary .dat file. This data is then stored in <code>urldata</code>, which is a long char array. When I then use <code>textscan</code> in MATLAB, I get 12 columns as desired, which are stored in a cell array <code>data_received</code>. </p>
  
  <p>However, in Octave I get various warning messages: <code>warning: strread: field width '%5s' (fmt spec # 1) extends beyond actual word limit</code> (for various field widths). My question is, why is my result different in Octave and how could I fix this? Shouldn't Octave behave the same as MATLAB, as in theory any differences should be dealt with as bugs? </p>
  
  <p>Surely specifying the width of the strings and leaving both the delimiter and whitespace input arguments empty should tell the function to only deal with width of string, allowing spaces to be a valid characters.</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be much appreciated.</p>