How to read in a file in its bit representation

Hi everyone,

I was wondering whether I can read in any file from disk in its binary representation, so in its representation of "0"s and "1"s as it is stored on my disk.

Although I thought this may be trivial, I can only find commands for reading in data itself stored in some given format.

Can anyone help?

All the best to you Matlab wizards, Florian

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

You can use fread() to read in a file as bytes. Of course each byte is comprised of 0's and 1's. There is no "bit" data class in MATLAB - the bytes is the smallest. If you want, you can extract each 0 or 1 from a byte into 8 byte array, such as an array of uint8 or char, but that' just increases the storage by a factor of 8, though you do get each 0 and 1 just by itself.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

bits = fread(fid, '*ubit1', 'ieee-le');

Adjust the 'ieee-le' to 'ieee-be' if you prefer (this controls whether the bits will be output from least significant first or from most significant first)