Use MATLAB Arrays in Python

To use MATLAB^® arrays in Python^®, you can either install the Python engine before running your packaged application, as described in Install MATLAB Engine API for Python, or use import mypackage before import matlab in the following programs.

The MATLAB Engine API for Python provides a Python package named matlab that enables you to call MATLAB functions from Python. The matlab package provides constructors to create MATLAB arrays in Python. It can create arrays of any MATLAB numeric or logical type from Python sequence types. Multidimensional MATLAB arrays are supported. For a list of other supported array types, see Pass Data Between MATLAB and Python.

Examples

1. Create a MATLAB array in Python, and call a MATLAB function on it. Assuming that you have a package named mypackage and a method called mysqrt inside the package, you can use matlab.double to create an array of doubles given a Python list that contains numbers. You can call the MATLAB function mysqrt on x, and the return value is another matlab.double array as shown in the following program:

   import matlab
   import mypackage
   pkg = mypackage.initialize()
   x = matlab.double([1,4,9,16,25])
   print(pkg.mysqrt(x))
   

   The output is:

   [[1.0,2.0,3.0,4.0,5.0]]

2. Create a multidimensional array. The magic function returns a 2-D array to Python scope. Assuming you have method called mysqrt inside mypackage, you can use the following code to call that method:

   import matlab
   import mypackage
   pkg = mypackage.initialize()
   x = matlab.double([1,4,9,16,25])
   print(pkg.mymagic(6))
   

   The output is:

   [[35.0,1.0,6.0,26.0,19.0,24.0],[3.0,32.0,7.0,21.0,23.0,25.0],
    [31.0,9.0,2.0,22.0,27.0,20.0],[8.0,28.0,33.0,17.0,10.0,15.0],
    [30.0,5.0,34.0,12.0,14.0,16.0],[4.0,36.0,29.0,13.0,18.0,11.0]]