IS there an alternative way to store data in matlab other than .mat?

The kind of data i'll be saving is a type double matrix of around 120 lines and columns and prefferrably i'll need to fill each line seperately using a loop i already wrote.

[Adam]

Why do you need an alternative? You can write to a text file or a binary file if you wish, or to an Excel file, but a .mat file is usually simplest since you can just save the matrix exactly as is with a one line command and no extra work and load it back with another one line command.

[Elias Unk]

because it's simply not activating for some reason which is highly unfortunate so i need an alternative.

[Adam]

What do you mean by 'activating'? You just save a file and load it.

[John D'Errico]

What do you mean by "not activating"? .mat files work just fine in geenral. So what are you trying to do? And why do you think there is a problem?

[Elias Unk]

image_folder = 'C:\Users\...';
filenames = dir(fullfile(image_folder, '*.jpg'));  % read all images with specified extention, its jpg in our case
 total_images = numel(filenames);    % count total number of photos present in that folder
for n = 1:total_images
  full_name= fullfile(image_folder, filenames(n).name); 
our_images = imread(full_name); 
%%%core features extraction code.....
Vecteur=[v1,v2,v3....v116];
normalized=zscore(Vecteur)  ;
    A{n} = normalized; % make A as a cell
  end
  save('features.mat','A');   % create database

when i go to check my database the file starts over and ask me to chose if it's a blank project etc..not sure what i'm doing wrong as it's my first time using .mat

[Elias Unk]

I even tried testing if it's a code issue by commenting

%save('features.mat','A');

and replacing with

dlmwrite('myFile.txt',B)

which worked just as expected while this is what i'm getting on .mat

[Stephen23]

@Elias Unk: a MATLAB .mat file is not a Microsoft Access Table file, even if they have the same file extension. I don't see why you think that Microsoft Access should know anything about how to open a MATLAB MAT file. You seem to have misunderstood what a MATLAB MAT file is.

[Elias Unk]

Apparently so but it kinda opens with it by default,what's the correct way to access it and check the values inside it?

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/103000-why-have-all-my-mat-files-become-associated-with-microsoft-access

[Walter Roberson]

The R2015a description of the debugging related commands is at http://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2015a/matlab/debugging-code.html . You might need active software support to read that page.

The facilities have not changed much from R2015* to R2017a. You can read https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/debugging-process-and-features.html but note that in R2015* there is no "Pause" button.

[Stephen23]

"what's the correct way to access it and check the values inside it?"

Errr... by using MATLAB, and not Microsoft Access? I know some Microsoft users love double-clicking everything in sight, but did you consider simply using MATLAB to read that file?

S = load(filename)

After all, this is what the MATLAB documentation describes:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_env/save-load-and-delete-workspace-variables.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/load.html

[Elias Unk]

Stephen,if you read bellow before dropping this comment you'd realize that

load(filename)

by itself wasn't enough then Jan guided through the last commend,Regards.

Answer 1

[Jan]

Open MAT files by the Matlab:

FileData = load('File.mat')

Or use the https://de.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matfile.html matfile command.

I never needed to open a MAT file by a double click, but if MS Office was installed after Matlab, the .mat extensions is associated to MS Access. There are several methods to associate it with Matlab again, simply ask your favorite internet search engine for these terms.

[Elias Unk]

so i selected it's folder and used

FileData = load('features.mat')

then

disp(FileData)

in command window and gotten: B: {35x1 cell} what i want tho is to visualize it is the values inside it similar to what i'd see in an excel file,doable?

[Walter Roberson]

To view the values similar to what you see in an excel file, you would have to build a uitable() .

If it happens that the cells inside of B are all the same size, and are all either numeric or character vector, then you might be able to combine the contents into a single cell and then view that, perhaps in the variable browser.

In the meantime look at celldisp()

[Jan]

Matlab is not Excel, fortunately. But you can open the variable in Matlab's ArrayEditor:

openvar(FileData.B)

[Elias Unk]

Thanks walter and Jan,and worked beautifully Jan.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

MATLAB supports the following:

• arbitrary binary files, using fread() and fwrite()
• structured binary files, using memmapfile()
• binary .mat files, using save(), which supports all MATLAB data types
• rectangular blocks of plain text, using save -ASCII, which supports numeric scalars and vectors and 2D arrays only
• .csv for numeric values, using csvwrite(); characters are not supported
• text files for numeric values with arbitrary delimiter between fields, using dlmwrite(); characters are not supported
• .csv and .xls for numeric values, using xlswrite(); on systems that are not MS Windows or which do not have Microsoft Excel installed, characters are not supported
• .xlsx for mixed values, using xlswrite(), including on systems that are not MS Windows or which do not have Microsoft Excel installed; full support for this started in roughly 2012
• HDF4 files (read-only), and HDF5 files (read and write), using hdf*() and h5*() functions
• NETCDF files
• general xml documents
• standard ODBC-compliant and JDBC-compliant databases, including Oracle®, SAS®, MySQL®, Sybase®, Microsoft® SQL Server®, Microsoft® Access™, and PostgreSQL®, using the Database Toolbox

As well as a number of other more specialized formats.