Read .mat files in Python

An import is required, import scipy.io...

import scipy.io
mat = scipy.io.loadmat('file.mat')

There is a nice package called mat4py which can easily be installed using

pip install mat4py

It is straightforward to use (from the website):

Load data from a MAT-file

The function loadmat loads all variables stored in the MAT-file into a simple Python data structure, using only Python’s dict and list objects. Numeric and cell arrays are converted to row-ordered nested lists. Arrays are squeezed to eliminate arrays with only one element. The resulting data structure is composed of simple types that are compatible with the JSON format.

Example: Load a MAT-file into a Python data structure:

from mat4py import loadmat

data = loadmat('datafile.mat')

The variable data is a dict with the variables and values contained in the MAT-file.

Save a Python data structure to a MAT-file

Python data can be saved to a MAT-file, with the function savemat. Data has to be structured in the same way as for loadmat, i.e. it should be composed of simple data types, like dict, list, str, int, and float.

Example: Save a Python data structure to a MAT-file:

from mat4py import savemat

savemat('datafile.mat', data)

The parameter data shall be a dict with the variables.

There is a great library for this task called: pymatreader.

Just do as follows:

1. Install the package: pip install pymatreader

2. Import the relevant function of this package: from pymatreader import read_mat

3. Use the function to read the matlab struct: data = read_mat('matlab_struct.mat')

4. use data.keys() to locate where the data is actually stored.

• The keys will usually look like: dict_keys(['__header__', '__version__', '__globals__', 'data_opp']). Where data_opp will be the actual key which stores the data. The name of this key can ofcourse be changed between different files.

5. Last step - Create your dataframe: my_df = pd.DataFrame(data['data_opp'])

That's it :)

To read mat file to pandas dataFrame with mixed data types

import scipy.io as sio
mat=sio.loadmat('file.mat')# load mat-file
mdata = mat['myVar']  # variable in mat file 
ndata = {n: mdata[n][0,0] for n in mdata.dtype.names}
Columns = [n for n, v in ndata.items() if v.size == 1]
d=dict((c, ndata[c][0]) for c in Columns)
df=pd.DataFrame.from_dict(d)
display(df)

Apart from scipy.io.loadmat for v4 (Level 1.0), v6, v7 to 7.2 matfiles and h5py.File for 7.3 format matfiles, there is anther type of matfiles in text data format instead of binary, usually created by Octave, which can't even be read in MATLAB.

Both of scipy.io.loadmat and h5py.File can't load them (tested on scipy 1.5.3 and h5py 3.1.0), and the only solution I found is numpy.loadtxt.

import numpy as np
mat = np.loadtxt('xxx.mat')

Can also use the hdf5storage library. official documentation here for details on matlab version support.

import hdf5storage

label_file = "./LabelTrain.mat"
out = hdf5storage.loadmat(label_file) 

print(type(out)) # <class 'dict'>

from os.path import dirname, join as pjoin
import scipy.io as sio
data_dir = pjoin(dirname(sio.__file__), 'matlab', 'tests', 'data')
mat_fname = pjoin(data_dir, 'testdouble_7.4_GLNX86.mat')
mat_contents = sio.loadmat(mat_fname)

You can use above code to read the default saved .mat file in Python.

scipy will work perfectly to load the .mat files. And we can use the get() function to convert it to a numpy array.

mat = scipy.io.loadmat('point05m_matrix.mat')

x = mat.get("matrix")
print(type(x))
print(len(x))

plt.imshow(x, extent=[0,60,0,55], aspect='auto')
plt.show()