Reading and writing .mat files with Python

from: http://www.janeriksolem.net/2009/05/reading-and-writing-mat-files-with.html
Reading
and writing .mat files with Python

If you have some old data, or find some interesting data set online,
stored in Matlab's .mat file format it is possible to read this using
the scipy.io module in SciPy
. This is
how to do it.

data = scipy.io.loadmat('test.mat')

"data"
now contains a dictionary with keys corresponding to the variable names
saved in the original .mat file. The variables are in array format.
Saving to .mat files is equally simple. Just create a dictionary with
all variables you want to save and use savemat()
.

data = {}
data['x'] = x
scipy.io.savemat('test.mat',data)

This
saves the array x
so that it
has the name "x" when read into Matlab.