Plotting File data:

It is frequently essential to read data from a file and plot it. Generally, this entails knowing the format of the file. For illustration, let us suppose that a company has two divisions, called A &B. The file 'ab06.dat' has 4 lines in it (we will suppose this), with the sales figures in millions for the two divisions for each quarter of the year 2006. For illustration, the file may appear like this (the format will be precisely like this):

A5.2B6.4

A3.2B5.5

A4.4B4.3

A4.5B2.2

The script below reads the data and plots in one Figure Window the data as the bar charts. The script prints an error message when the file open is not successful or when the file close was unsuccessful. The axis command is used to force the x-axis to range from 0 to 3 and the y-axis from 0 to 8 that will result in the axes shown here. The numbers 1 and 2 would display on the x-axis instead of the division labels A and B by default. The set function modifies the XTickLabel property to use the strings in the cell array as labels on the tick marks on the

x-axis; and gca returns the handle to the axes in the present figure (it stands for "get present axes").

Running this generates the subplot as shown in figure.