How to quickly view the variables in the mat file? My computer is poor, so it is slow to open matlab😭

Because my computer is poor, every time I open matlab, it takes a long time to initialize before I can write code normally. Many times, I need to look mat data files when writing deep learning programs, such as using scipy and tensorlfow. If I need to wait a long time to open the whole matlab just to view one mat file, which makes me feel very frustrated.😭

Therefore, I want to know if there are other softwares or methods that can quickly view the contents of mat files?

[Dyuman Joshi]

Maybe MATLAB Online can be helpful

[Sure]

Thank you for your answer. I think your answer is very valuable. But is there any other way?

[Stephen23]

" I want to know if there are other softwares or methods that can quickly view the contents of mat files?"

Note that you can always specify which variables you want to import: see the LOAD() documentation. From within MATLAB you can use WHOS() to see what variables the MAT file contains:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/whos.html#bu2_rt7

or MATFILE() refer to the variables, without loading (all of) the data into memory:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.io.matfile.html

Some other applications that natively work with MAT files and have similar functionality:

https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.io.loadmat.html

https://octave.sourceforge.io/octave/function/load.html

Answer 1

[dpb]

Just leave a MATLAB session open, don't close it if you have such use/need frequently.

Or, if the content of these .mat files is at least relatively static; echo

whos -file matfilename

to a text file to refer to at will...

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

https://comp.soft-sys.matlab.narkive.com/hkUdFzb0/quickly-list-variables-in-a-mat-file shows some C code that when compiled with the MATLAB API, should be able to list the names of variables in a .mat file