1. Importing MATLAB files
MATLAB, which is short
2. MATLAB
for Matrix Laboratory, is a numerical computing environment that is an industry standard in the disciplines of engineering and science. This is due in part to its powerful linear algebra and matrix capabilities, in part to its proprietary nature and in part to how difficult the academic world finds it to shake off old habits. Regardless of the reasons for its widespread use, the fact of the matter is that a lot of people use MATLAB and save their data as 'dot mat' files, the file format native to MATLAB. How can you import these into Python?
3. SciPy to the rescue!
Luckily for us Python afficionados, the standard library scipy has functions loadmat and savemat, which allow us to read and write dot mat files, respectively.
4. What is a .mat file?
"What exactly is in a dot mat file?" you may ask. To answer this, lets look at the MATLAB IDE. In particular,
5. What is a .mat file?
check out the MATLAB workspace where all your variables are stored. This workspace can contain strings, floats, vectors and arrays, among many other objects. A dot mat file is simply a collection of such objects.
6. Importing a .mat file
Now this means when importing a dot mat file in Python, we should expect to see a number of different variables and objects. In this code, I first import scipy-dot-io and then load the file 'workspace dot mat'. Checking out what type of object results tells me that it's a dictionary.
How this dictionary relates to a MATLAB workspace is straightforward: the keys of the Python dictionary are the MATLAB variable names and the values of the Python dictionary are the objects that are assigned to the variables. In the example above, mat['x'] is a numpy corresponding to the MATLAB array x in your MATLAB workspace. It's that easy.
7. Let's practice!
Now it's your turn to import a MATLAB workspace and check out what it contains, happy exploring!