reading the Nth column of a .txt

Question

I work in fortran

I know that you can read several columns by doing :

read (20,*) a,b,c

but I have a document with something like 25 columns but i would like to read the 19th without having to use trash variables like i do know.

I use :

read (20,*) trash1,trash2,[...],trash18,VariaWanted

I would like to know if there is a "cleaner" way to do so. Especially if I can use an integer to say where it is, so I can put it in "in variable" of function or subroutine.

Answer 1

You do not show the actual format of your file. Often the tables use fixed column width. Then you can just use explicit format to read just that character columns in the row.

read (20,'(t42,f8.0)') a

Provided you want to read a real that uses 8 characters and starts on character column 42.

Answer 2

Perhaps:

real, dimension (25) :: temp
real :: keep
read (20,*) temp
keep = temp (19)