What is the best approach to reading ascii data (delimited by space, comma, tab, etc.) from files using Obj-C/Cocoa?

Example file format: (actual files will be much, much larger)

Col1 Col2 Col3 Col4 … 1.0 32.0 4.5 5.1 … 2.0 45.0 19.0 12.6 … 3.0 54.0 21.2 23.2 … … … …

Data would have been originally written using FORTRAN formatted.

The goal would be to read the entire data set into a 2D array for later processing. Unfortunantly, the number of columns & rows of data will not be known prior to the read, however a newline character for each row will exist.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, …clark

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Use NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error: to read the data into a string then use NSScanner to parse it.