Data blob variable

My goal is to pass a blob of data out of a function that contains a .mat file. Currently I can get close to the desired behavior with the following snippet.

save('functionspace_data.mat');
fid = fopen('functionspace_data.mat');
blob = fread(fid, inf, '*uint8');

But I need to do a similar thing without the use of files in the middle of the code. The format of the blob does not need to be .mat, but does have to be in a format that when converted to a file can quickly reload my function space.

Thanks in advance, Mike

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Please vote for the suggestion to expose the serialization routines, http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1325-what-is-missing-from-matlab#answer_2153 here.

The ease of hacking it yourself depends on what kind of data structures you want to be able to use. Objects and handles are the most difficult; plain numeric arrays can be fairly easy.

Some of the bundling and unbundling work for structures can be done by memmapfile(), but I suspect that might be tend to be on the slower side.

[Mike]

Based on us asking for this in the "what is missing from matlab" forum. I assume there is not really a clean way of doing this without the use of a intermediate file. Thats unfortunate.

[Walter Roberson]

Yup. The closest I've seen is that R2011a (I think it was) introduced a method of serializing graphics files for transmission -- but that was part of the MATLAB Coder tool for generating C code such as for embedded systems.