Serialize/Deserialize

Encode and decode almost any matlab variable into a sequence of bytes.

Description

This pair of functions can serialize and deserialize (i.e. encode and decode) almost any matlab object into a sequence of bytes. This will be useful for saving objects to disk, sending them over the network, or perhaps to other programs.

Any combination of structs, cells and matrices are supported. All the data types (i.e. all integer sizes, chars, bools, singles and doubles) are supported. They are automatically converted back to double on decoding, but you can easily change this.

I haven't tested it extensively, but it's quite short so any bugs should be easy to fix.

Usage is like this:

astruct.field1 = [1 2 3]; astruct.field2 = {'foo', 'bar', 'baz'};
serialized_astruct = serialize(astruct);
deserialized_astruct = deserialize(serialized_astruct);

After execution, astruct and deserialized_astruct should be equal.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
serialize
This submission has inspired the following:
DataHash, Fast serialize/deserialize

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.11 (2010b)

[Jan Simon]

Instead of a growing array, it would be faster to create a growing cell and cat the subvectors at the end.

[Mohammad Reza]

needs a bit of work to make it work with logical values. typecast() doesnt cope with logicals.

[Jeff]

This is a handy function. I noted a problem if you gave it an empty structure. But aside from that it seems to work for the datatypes I used it with.

[Hakon]

Tim - thanks a lot - how could this be extended to also serialize functions / function handles?

[Tim]

Hakon: You mean so you can send entire functions? That would be difficult, but check out func2str() and functions().

[Kay H. Brodersen]

Tim, this is a great tool. In order to support boolean variables, you could add the following two lines before line 59 in serialize.m (version 16/12/210):

elseif islogical(v)
    m = [m; double(v)];