Addressing variables with special characters in the name

Hi,

I have some .mat files generated by an external program which have some variables with a percentage sign in them. Is there any way at all to address these variables within matlab, really just to rename them to something without the special character?

i.e change nnnn% to nnnn

Many thanks

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/42274-loadfixnames-loads-a-mat-file-fixing-invalid-names

not sure if it still works

[Walter Roberson]

(I tried it a couple of months ago, around April 2023, and it still worked.)

Answer 2

[dpb]

A brute-force, dead-ahead solution is at <Fix .mat file variable names>. It's simply string substitution...as @Walter Roberson notes, the new variable name must be the same length as the original to not corrupt the file; that is you must substitute in a valid character in place of the invalid one, you can't just eliminate it, thereby shortening the name.