Is there any way to read MATLAB's .mat files in Perl?

Question

I have some data generated in MATLAB that I want to process using Perl. I saved the data from MATLAB in a .mat file. Is there any way to read it in Perl?

Answer 1

The Java library JMatIO has worked well for me. Maybe you can try using inline Java.

Answer 2

One option would be to save the binary MAT file as ASCII from inside MATLAB using something like:

load('test_data.mat');
save('test_data.asc', 'var1', 'var2', '-ascii');

Then you would have ASCII data to process in Perl.

If you need a solution completely written in Perl, then you should be able to automate the process using the Math::MATLAB package on CPAN.

NOTE: If Python is an option, you could use the loadmat function in the SciPy Python library.