loading files with headers and footers

[Jonas Amhest]

Hi all, this is my first time posting to the Octave mailing list.

I'm not an absolute beginner but I'm a fairly novice programmer using a WinXP system with the latest Octave installed. I'm trying to load a .txt file that includes a header (not commented out), data, and a "footer" at the end of the columns like this:

testing header
jlkasjdsfjk
kj213
1    5
2    9
3    2
4    5
5    8
adfa

I know the load command doesn't work because it has a header and I've tried looking up and attempting to make sscanf, scanf, fscanf, fopen etc and can't get it to work at all. I keep getting errors saying that line is undefined at column x and row y where there isn't even any data. How can I skip the three first lines of the header above, read in the two data columns, and then skip the last line?

Thank you so much!

-Mike