How to Read MATLAB

MATLAB can import data from many file types.

MATLAB, produced by MathWorks, is a software package for technical data acquisition, analysis, modeling and graphing. Functions provided by MATLAB allow you to import data from a wide variety of raw, image, spreadsheet and other formats. MATLAB also provides low-level file I/O functions that allow you to read and format data from arbitrary file types.

Instructions

1. Execute the uiimport() function to open a file selection window. After selecting a file, MATLAB will attempt to guess the file format and read formatted data into a MATLAB matrix. The default name of the workspace variable is the name of the file.

2. Execute the importdata() function to load data if you know a file name or have it stored in a string. The importdata() function will call the associated function based on the file extension.

   my_data = importdata('my_spreadsheet.xls"'; %Opens using xlsread()
   my_data = importdata('my_ascii_file.dat','\t',5); %Opens a tab-delimited ASCII file with 5 header lines

3. Call the file-specific import function directly to open the many file types that MATLAB recognizes. This will also allow you to specify additional options for importing non-standard format files.

   my_data = xlsread('my_spreadsheet.xls',2); %read from spreadsheet 2
   my_image = imread('my_image.tif');

4. Open binary data files using the low-level file I/O functions fopen() and fread().

   my_file_handle = fopen('my_binary_file.dat','rb');
   my_data = fread(my_file_handle,n_datapoints,'single'); %read n single-precision floating point numbers
   fclose(my_file_handle);

References

• MathWorks: Open Import Wizard to Import Data - MATLAB
• MathWorks: Load Data From File - MATLAB
• MathWorks: Data Import and Export :: Function Reference (MATLAB)