tdmswriteprop writing garbage names

I am trying to shorten the channel names of a tdms file so that I can load it in matlab. However, the renaming fails after a few loops with error 6617 (file already contains an object with that name). When I reload the tdms info, I find that the new channel names are just a bunch of garbage characters:

If try to change the name of a renamed channel, I get an 'invalid channel' error:

This appears to be caused by a bug in how the tdmswriteprop function escapes special characters. For some reason, placing a space before the special character breaks it. For example: changing a channel name to "test/test/test" works fine, but "test /test /test" produces garbage characters.

[Nithin]

Hi @Paul,

I tried to reproduce this at my end and it works fine for me.

Could you please attach the files you are using or any steps to reproduce this issue?

Answer 1

[Shaunak]

Hi Paul,

I understand that you are facing some issues while writing property values to a TDMS file using tdmswriteprop in MATLAB.

There is a known issue in MATLAB R2023b and R2024a where writing property values longer than 15 characters to a TDMS file using tdmswriteprop can result in invalid or corrupted characters. This can cause problems when you later try to read or update those properties.

This issue has been discussed in the MATLAB Answers thread below, kindly refer to this for more information:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2104801-tdmswriteprop-write-error-code-for-long-digits

Hope this helps!