Why does IMPORTDATA or LOAD read in HEX files incorrectly in MATLAB?

I have a .HEX file containing these values:

0x0C50 0xDA82 0xFFFF 0xF3D2 0x3D60 0x803E 

When I try to read this hex data using the "load" function and convert it to decimal on a Windows machine, the data values starting with '0xD' are read as '0xE' when converted to decimal. For example, I call

load('test.hex') 

where "test.hex" is the file which contains the above hex data. The output of the statement is

       3152       60034       65535       62434       15968       32830

However, the data should be

        3152       55938       65535       62418       15712       32830

Why does MATLAB not import the data from a HEX file as expected?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

The ability to read ASCII-coded hex using "importdata" or "load" is not available in MATLAB. To work around this issue, use "fscanf" to read the file. For example, you can read "test.hex" using "fopen" to open the file and "fscanf" to scan the hexadecimal values:

>> fid = fopen('test.hex');
>> a = fscanf(fid,'%x %x %x %x %x %x');
>> fclose(fid);

 

Another workaround is to read in the data as text and then use the "hex2dec" function to transform the hexadecimal values into decimals:

>> hexStr = '3FF';
>> D = hex2dec(hexStr)
D = 1023