Is there documentation on the structure of MAT-files in MATLAB?

Is there documentation on the structure of MAT-files in MATLAB?

I would like to create MAT-files without the presence of MATLAB. These MAT-files will be created in my C or FORTRAN programs, but read in at a later time into MATLAB.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

We strongly recommend using our MAT-file routines, described in our External Interfaces manual, for reading and writing MAT-files in MATLAB. This will ensure compatibility should the structure of the MAT-file change in the future.

Should it be absolutely necessary to write your own routines to read/write MAT-files, we have published the MAT-file format in the Access area of our web site. To find this PDF document, point your web browser to:

 https://www.mathworks.com/help/pdf_doc/matlab/matfile_format.pdf

Note that MATLAB 5.x and later can read MATLAB 4.x MAT-files. Therefore, if you have code that you used in MATLAB 4.x to create MAT-files, you can still create MAT-files with this code and read the MAT-files into MATLAB 5.x and later versions.