Write to a Diary File

To keep an activity log of your MATLAB^® session, use the diary function. When enabled, diary logs entered commands, keyboard input, and text output from the Command Window to a UTF-8 encoded text file on your system.

For example, if you have the array A = [ 1 2 3 4; 5 6 7 8 ] in your workspace, you can use the diary function to save A and its contents to a text file.

1. Enable logging using the diary function. Optionally, you can name the log file diary creates. For example, enable logging and specify the log filename as my_data.out. diary creates the file my_data.out and starts recording all entered commands, keyboard input, and text output from the Command Window.

   diary my_data.out
   

2. Display the contents of the array you want to save, for example, A. You also can display a cell array or other MATLAB class.

   A

   A =
       1     2     3     4
       5     6     7     8
   

3. Disable logging.

   diary off
   

4. Display the contents of my_data.out using the type function.

   type my_data.out

   A
   
   A =
   
        1     2     3     4
        5     6     7     8
   
   diary off
   

5. Open the diary file my_data.out in a text editor and remove extraneous text, if desired.