Importing .bin file and doing Time Domain Analysis

Is it possible to import a .bin file to Matlab? How? Do I need to make any format conversion of .bin file before importing it?

[Walter Roberson]

.bin is not a standard file format. .bin is an extension programmers use for any binary data that only works with their particular program. You would need details on how that particular program stores data inside the file.

Answer 1

[Ayush Gupta]

 A bin file can be imported in MATLAB using fread function. Suppose we have a bin file named input.bin, refer to the following code:

fileID = fopen('input.bin');  
A = fread(fileID) 

The documentation of fread and examples on how to use it, refer here.

[Walter Roberson]

Note that for files,

A = fread(fileID) 

is the same as

A = fread(fileID, [inf 1], 'uint8=>double')

So I would typically recommend

A = fread(fileID, [1 inf], '*uint8');

This would give you an uninterpreted stream of bytes.

... but .bin files are rarely intended to be just streams of bytes. They usually have a format with some kind of header, and then data that is often not uint8. You would need to find the documentation for that particular application to know how to interpret the bytes -- there is no standard at all for ".bin" files.

That said... there are some files that are intended to be portable between applications that use .bin file extension. unofficial standards for that kind of data. At the moment we do not know enough to know whether this is one of those cases.

[Tahajib Abdur Rahman]

Thanks Walter. Appreciate it.