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Write to a Diary File

To keep an activity log of your MATLAB® session, use the diary function. When enabled, diary logs entered commands, keyboard input, and text output from the Command Window to a UTF-8 encoded text file on your system.

For example, if you have the array A = [ 1 2 3 4; 5 6 7 8 ] in your workspace, you can use the diary function to save A and its contents to a text file.

  1. Enable logging using the diary function. Optionally, you can name the log file diary creates. For example, enable logging and specify the log filename as my_data.out. diary creates the file my_data.out and starts recording all entered commands, keyboard input, and text output from the Command Window.

    diary my_data.out

  2. Display the contents of the array you want to save, for example, A. You also can display a cell array or other MATLAB class.

    A
    A =
    1     2     3     4
    5     6     7     8

  3. Disable logging.

    diary off

  4. Display the contents of my_data.out using the type function.

    type my_data.out
    A

A =

     1     2     3     4
     5     6     7     8

diary off

  5. Open the diary file my_data.out in a text editor and remove extraneous text, if desired.

See Also

Functions

Related Topics