Skip to main content

Loading matlab binary (.mat) files into python

It happens. You have old data in matlab .mat format or your colleagues insist, for some obscure reason, on using MATLAB. You need scipy.io.loadmat and scipy.io.savemat from scipy.

import scipy.io
X = scipy.io.loadmat('mydata.mat')

X now contains a dictionary whose keys correspond to the variable names saved in the original mat file.

UPDATE:
Nested dictionaries seem to be a problem. A kind soul has a short set of methods that converts nested dictionaries here.

UPDATE:

Look here (scipy cookbook) for how to handle mat files from recent versions of matlab
Labels:

Comments

  1. CamillaJune 12, 2009 at 3:51 AM

    Hi,
    Loved this trick:)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 31, 2009 at 9:53 PM

    thanks! it's very useful

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJanuary 10, 2010 at 2:52 AM

    Very useful, thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJuly 23, 2010 at 1:43 PM

    Doesn't read Matlab 7.3 files. It complains and suggests using the HDF reader.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Kaushik GhoseJuly 26, 2010 at 8:28 AM

    Hi,

    Thanks for pointing that out! From the cookbook (http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Reading_mat_files) I see that they suggest using PyTables or h5py packages.

    ReplyDelete
  6. NicolauAugust 8, 2010 at 12:48 PM

    Thank you so much! I love to find out something like that is actually extremely easy. :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or
Post a Comment
Read more

Using adminer on Mac OS X

adminer is a nice php based sqlite manager. I prefer the firefox plugin "sqlite manager" but it currently has a strange issue with FF5 that basically makes it unworkable, so I was looking for an alternative to tide me over. I really don't want apache running all the time on my computer and don't want people browsing to my computer, so what I needed to do was: Download the adminer php script into /Library/WebServer/Documents/ Change /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to allow running of php scripts (uncomment the line that begins: LoadModule php5_module Start the apache server: sudo apachectl -k start Operate the script by going to localhost Stop the server: sudo apachectl -k stop  
Post a Comment
Read more