Is there a way to tell the load function to only load until a certain line?

I want to read in a data file and assign the numbers to an array, however, I want it to stop after it has created a 200 X 200.

Could I also do this with a do-while loop and fgetl? When I try to use fgetl(fid, len) and give it 'len', it does not obey :-/

How can I tell octave to ignore the comment lines in an input file? They are '#' characters, so I figured octave would just automatically ignore them, but not so...

Thanks.