I have done a project in Matlab and now I have uninstalled Matlab. Now, I need some reference of my project. I'm left with all the .mat files. I'm trying to open them in notepad and I'm getting unicode characters over there. My question is simple. How do I open the Matlab code in .mat file into notepad or some word processor?
Download Notepad++ (notepad-plus-plus.org) it opens nearly any file format and recognizes breaks, comments and does all the same color coding as the original language formatting.
A .mat-file is a compressed binary file. It is not possible to open it with a text editor (except you have a special plugin as Dennis Jaheruddin says). Otherwise you will have to convert it into a text file (csv for example) with a script. This could be done by python for example: Read .mat files in Python.
You don't need to download any new software. You can use Octave Online to open .m files.
There's a really nice easy way to do this in Macintosh OsX. A fellow has made a quicklook plugin (command-space) that renders .mat formats so you can view the variables inside etc. Quite useful! https://github.com/jaketmp/matlab-quicklook/releases
.mat files contain binary data, so you will not be able to open them easily with a word processor. There are some options for opening them outside of MATLAB:
If all you need to do is look at the files, you could obtain Octave, which is a free, but somewhat slower implementation of MATLAB. You can refer to How do you open .mat files in Octave? for more information on the subject. You can get octave from http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html. The interface is very similar to MATLAB's.
As NKN and Ergodicity mentioned, there are python libaries available for this as well.
The most hardcore solution would be to write your own processor from scratch. The MAT file specification is available from MathWorks at http://www.mathworks.com/help/pdf_doc/matlab/matfile_format.pdf.
If you are using the free software R, you can open the matlab files in Rstudio. Very easy!
Source: Stackoverflow.com