mlabwrap-purepy

The original mlabwrap <http://mlabwrap.sourceforge.net/>_ is a Python-Matlab bridge that enables one to execute Matlab code from Python, by automatically starting up a Matlab process in the background and talking to it.

However, mlabwrap requires a compilation step against Matlab, which can be quite an inconvenience. So Dani Valevski rewrote the low-level parts of mlabwrap in Python, and made these available as open source on Google Code <https://code.google.com/p/danapeerlab/source/browse/trunk/freecell/depends/common/python/>_.

The code you are looking at now, is simply the pure python mlabwrap code that has been packaged together and slightly improved by Charl Botha <http://charlbotha.com>_.

Improvements

• More intelligent determination of Matlab binary path and versioning.
• Many bug fixes for scipy 0.12 + matlab 2011b.
• mlab.name will return the value of matlab variable name. This syntax only used to work for invoking functions.
• Error reporting.
• Documentation.
• setuptools configuration, so you can install mlabwrap with a single pip invocation! See below for details.

Quickstart

Linux

Install mlabwrap-purepy::

    sudo easy_install pip
    sudo pip install numpy
    sudo pip install scipy
    sudo pip install git+https://github.com/cpbotha/mlabwrap-purepy.git

These instructions will install pip, numpy, scipy and mlabwrap-purepy 
system-wide. If you're hip enough to use `virtualenv`, you're hip 
enough to figure out how to do this in a virtualenv. :)

Using from Python

Also see the docstring in mlabwrap.py. It goes something like this::

import mlabwrap
mlab = mlabwrap.init()

If the main matlab executable (or a symlink to it) is not on your system PATH, pass its full path as the first parameter to init. Now you can do::

sorted = mlab.sort([1 2 3])

Or even::

mlab._do("a = [3 2 1]; b = mean(a);", nout=0)
print mlab.b