Time for action – saving and loading a .mat file

If we start with NumPy arrays and decide to use the said arrays within a MATLAB or Octave environment, the easiest thing to do is create a .mat file. We then can load the file within MATLAB or Octave. Let’s go through the necessary steps:

1. Create a NumPy array and call savemat to create a .mat file. This function has two parameters – a filename and a dictionary containing variable names and values.

   a = np.arange(7)
   
   io.savemat(“a.mat”, {“array”: a})

2. Within a MATLAB or Octave environment, load the .mat file and check the stored array.

   octave-3.4.0:7> load a.mat
   octave-3.4.0:8> a
   
   octave-3.4.0:8> array
   array =
   
     0
     1
     2
     3
     4
     5
     6

What just happened?

We created a .mat file from NumPy code and loaded it within Octave. We checked the NumPy array that was created (see scipyio.py).

import numpy as np
from scipy import io

a = np.arange(7)

io.savemat(“a.mat”, {“array”: a})

Pop quiz – loading .mat files

Q1. Which function loads .mat files...