how to open .mat file without using MATLAB?

matlab notepad
Balaji Radhakrishnan picture Balaji Radhakrishnan · Sep 12, 2014 · Viewed 104.1k times · Source

I have done a project in Matlab and now I have uninstalled Matlab. Now, I need some reference of my project. I'm left with all the .mat files. I'm trying to open them in notepad and I'm getting unicode characters over there. My question is simple. How do I open the Matlab code in .mat file into notepad or some word processor?

Answer

Mad Physicist picture Mad Physicist · Sep 12, 2014

.mat files contain binary data, so you will not be able to open them easily with a word processor. There are some options for opening them outside of MATLAB:

If all you need to do is look at the files, you could obtain Octave, which is a free, but somewhat slower implementation of MATLAB. You can refer to How do you open .mat files in Octave? for more information on the subject. You can get octave from http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html. The interface is very similar to MATLAB's.

As NKN and Ergodicity mentioned, there are python libaries available for this as well.

The most hardcore solution would be to write your own processor from scratch. The MAT file specification is available from MathWorks at http://www.mathworks.com/help/pdf_doc/matlab/matfile_format.pdf.

Related questions

Read .mat files in Python

Is it possible to read binary MATLAB .mat files in Python? I've seen that SciPy has alleged support for reading .mat files, but I'm unsuccessful with it. I installed SciPy version 0.7.0, and I can't find the loadmat() method.

Read More
How do I iterate through each element in an n-dimensional matrix in MATLAB?

I have a problem. I need to iterate through every element in an n-dimensional matrix in MATLAB. The problem is, I don't know how to do this for an arbitrary number of dimensions. I know I can say for i = 1:…

Read More
Setting graph figure size

All I want to do is make the width greater and the height smaller. I'm just doing raster plots but this question applies to any MATLAB figure. I can manually resize it using the figure directly when it's created but …

Read More