Reading a Matlab's cell array saved as a v7.3 .mat file with H5py

Question

I saved a cell array as a .mat file in Matlab as follows:

test = {\'hello\'; \'world!\'};
save(\'data.mat\', \'test\', \'-v7.3\')

How can I

Answer 1

Writing in Matlab:

test = {'Hello', 'world!'; 'Good', 'morning'; 'See', 'you!'};
save('data.mat', 'test', '-v7.3') % v7.3 so that it is readable by h5py

Reading in Python (works for any number or rows or columns, but assumes that each cell is a string):

import h5py
import numpy as np

data = []
with h5py.File("data.mat") as f:
    for column in f['test']:
        row_data = []
        for row_number in range(len(column)):            
            row_data.append(''.join(map(unichr, f[column[row_number]][:])))   
        data.append(row_data)

print data
print np.transpose(data)

Output:

[[u'Hello', u'Good', u'See'], [u'world!', u'morning', u'you!']]

[[u'Hello' u'world!']
 [u'Good' u'morning']
 [u'See' u'you!']]