Reading .mat Files Using pymatreader 📊

To efficiently read MATLAB .mat files in Python, pymatreader simplifies the process by returning data as a nested dictionary, akin to scipy.io.loadmat style.

Usage Example 🚀

import pymatreader

# Specify the path to your .mat file
filename = 'path/to/your/file.mat'

# Read the .mat file
data = pymatreader.read_mat(filename)

# Now 'data' contains the structured information from the .mat file

Parameters 🛠️

• filename (str): Path and filename of the .mat file containing the data.
• variable_names (list of strings, optional): Specify to read only data from certain keys or variable names.
• ignore_fields (list of strings, optional): Exclude specific keys or variable names from the structure (works for .mat files v7.3).
• uint16_codec (str | None, optional): Specify codec (e.g., 'latin1', 'utf-8') for character arrays with non-ASCII characters.

Return Value 📦

The function returns a dictionary representing the structure of the .mat file:

• Keys: Variable names.
• Values: Corresponding data.

Example 📝

Consider a .mat file example.mat with variables var1, var2, and var3. To load only var2 from this file:

data = pymatreader.read_mat('example.mat', variable_names=['var2'])

This loads only var2 into the data dictionary.

For additional details, consult the pymatreader documentation.

Using scipy.io.loadmat

Alternatively, you can use scipy.io.loadmat to read .mat files, which returns a dictionary-like object:

from scipy.io import loadmat

# Load .mat file
mat_data = loadmat('example.mat')

# Access variables
var1 = mat_data['var1']
var2 = mat_data['var2']

This approach loads all variables into a dictionary-like object mat_data, where each key is a variable name.

This markdown note provides comprehensive guidance for your team on reading MATLAB files in Python using pymatreader and scipy.io.loadmat.