I'm setting up a matrix of student marks; using NaNs for non-existent data: a question not attempted. I'd like to be able to store this as ascii text outside of Octave, with a row looking something like
5 2 N 3 4 N N 3 6 4
the N's indicating questions not attempted. I can read this into Octave with "fileread", and I get a long string, which I can then fiddle with to turn into numeric values and NaNs. The function "dlmread" is more convenient, but converts all non-numeric data to zeros.
Is there an easy way to store NaNs in an ascii file, and how then can that file be best read into Ocatve?