### Navigation

- index
- modules |
- modules |
- next |
- previous |
- SciPy v0.12 Reference Guide (DRAFT) »
- Input and output (`scipy.io`) »

# scipy.io.loadmat

`scipy.io.``loadmat`(file_name, mdict=None, appendmat=True, **kwargs)

  Load MATLAB file

  Parameters : | file_name : str Name of the mat file (do not need .mat extension if appendmat==True) Can also pass open file-like object. m_dict : dict, optional Dictionary in which to insert matfile variables. appendmat : bool, optional True to append the .mat extension to the end of the given filename, if not already present. byte_order : str or None, optional None by default, implying byte order guessed from mat file. Otherwise can be one of (‘native’, ‘=’, ‘little’, ‘<’, ‘BIG’, ‘>’). mat_dtype : bool, optional If True, return arrays in same dtype as would be loaded into MATLAB (instead of the dtype with which they are saved). squeeze_me : bool, optional Whether to squeeze unit matrix dimensions or not. chars_as_strings : bool, optional Whether to convert char arrays to string arrays. matlab_compatible : bool, optional Returns matrices as would be loaded by MATLAB (implies squeeze_me=False, chars_as_strings=False, mat_dtype=True, struct_as_record=True). struct_as_record : bool, optional Whether to load MATLAB structs as numpy record arrays, or as old-style numpy arrays with dtype=object. Setting this flag to False replicates the behavior of scipy version 0.7.x (returning numpy object arrays). The default setting is True, because it allows easier round-trip load and save of MATLAB files. variable_names : None or sequence If None (the default) - read all variables in file. Otherwise variable_names should be a sequence of strings, giving names of the matlab variables to read from the file. The reader will skip any variable with a name not in this sequence, possibly saving some read processing.
  Returns : | mat_dict : dict dictionary with variable names as keys, and loaded matrices as values

  Notes

  v4 (Level 1.0), v6 and v7 to 7.2 matfiles are supported.

  You will need an HDF5 python library to read matlab 7.3 format mat files. Because scipy does not supply one, we do not implement the HDF5 / 7.3 interface here.

### Navigation

- index
- modules |
- modules |
- next |
- previous |
- SciPy v0.12 Reference Guide (DRAFT) »
- Input and output (`scipy.io`) »