Page 115 - Basics of MATLAB and Beyond

>> whos
Name Size Bytes Class
a 1x1 8 double array
b 1x10 80 double array
str 1x5 10 char array
Grand total is 16 elements using 98 bytes

>> a
a =
1
>> b
b =
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
>> str
str =
hello

To save the data as readable text use the -ascii switch:
save saved_data_text -ascii

In this case the ‘.mat’ extension is not appended to the file name. The
ascii format is best kept for simple cases where your data is in the form
of a matrix (or vector or scalar). For example, in this case we have saved
the variables a, b, and c in a file that has the following contents:

1.0000000e+00
1.0000000e+00 2.0000000e+00 3.0000000e+00 ...
1.0400000e+02 1.0100000e+02 1.0800000e+02 ...
The first line is the variable a, the second line is the variable
b = [1 2 ... 10], and the third line is the string str = ’hello’ con-
verted to its corresponding ascii values:

>> double(str)
ans =
104 101 108 108 111
If you try to load this data using the load command you will get an error
message because the lines have different numbers of values. To load an
ascii file like this, you’ll have to write your own loading function using
the functions getl etc. described in the next section. If you save an
ascii matrix, however, you can load it in again without difficulty:

>> clear
>> q = spiral(3)

c 2000 by CRC Press LLC