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?
79 Answers
.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 . 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 .
1I 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.
2A .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.
0There'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!
Maybe MatFileViewer can be used to view mat file without matlab.
But it only supports 1D and 2D mat file.
You don't need to download any new software. You can use Octave Online to open .m files.
1If you are using the free software R, you can open the matlab files in Rstudio. Very easy!
0You can simply go to the octave online website: Then upload your files there. and load them using load function as done with MATLAB
2Download 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.
