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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?

Balaji Radhakrishnan
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    mat file is not ASCII so you cannot open it with notepad. You can try python though, check this: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy-0.14.0/reference/generated/scipy.io.loadmat.html – NKN Sep 12 '14 at 14:32
  • You can open them with Octave. See this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8099727/extract-mat-data-without-matlab-tried-scilab-unsuccessfully – Benoit_11 Sep 12 '14 at 14:34
  • thanks for the response. but I'm not familiar with python editor and I dont have Octave . that's the problem – Balaji Radhakrishnan Sep 12 '14 at 14:38
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    Have you considered just downloading a trial version of MATLAB, reading the files, saving them to a text format, and uninstalling again? That might be easier than any of the other options. – Sam Roberts Sep 12 '14 at 15:07
  • that's a good idea I will try it at last. – Balaji Radhakrishnan Sep 12 '14 at 15:10
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    `.m` files are the files containing codes. They can be open with any text editor. `.mat` files contain data in a binary format which will vary with the version. Try other simpler options first (as given in comments and answers), but if all else fail, you can try to recover your data by digging directly into the .mat file programmatically : [MAT file format](http://www.mathworks.com/help/pdf_doc/matlab/matfile_format.pdf) – Hoki Sep 12 '14 at 15:53
  • Don't forget to mark an answer as accepted answer. – Semjon Mössinger Sep 15 '14 at 06:04

7 Answers7

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.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.

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Mad Physicist
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I didn't use it myself but heard of a simple tool (not a text editor) for this so it is definitely possible without setting up a programming environment (by installing octave or python).

A quick search hints that it was possible with total commander. (A lightweight tool with an easy point and click interface)

I would not be surprised if this still works, but I can't guarantee it.

Dennis Jaheruddin
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A .mat-file is a compressed binary file. It is not possible to open it with a text editor (except you have a special plugin as Dennis Jaheruddin says). Otherwise you will have to convert it into a text file (csv for example) with a script. This could be done by python for example: Read .mat files in Python.

Community
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Semjon Mössinger
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There's a really nice easy way to do this in Macintosh OsX. A fellow has made a quicklook plugin (command-space) that renders .mat formats so you can view the variables inside etc. Quite useful! https://github.com/jaketmp/matlab-quicklook/releases

AllenH
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You don't need to download any new software. You can use Octave Online to open .m files.

Billy Yancey
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  • The question was about ".mat" files, which are binary.A ".m" (i.e. source file) can be opened with any text editor, even MS Word if you wish :-) – Rudolf Mayer Aug 12 '20 at 08:37
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If you are using the free software R, you can open the matlab files in Rstudio. Very easy!

Wiles01
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Download Notepad++ (notepad-plus-plus.org) it opens nearly any file format and recognizes breaks, comments and does all the same color coding as the original language formatting.

AndrewTLombardo
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