matlab date string results in java lang string in python scipy.io

Question

• I have a field of type <1x1 java.lang.String> in Matlab. Its value is 13:06:40

• When I read this mat-file in python,

Answer 1

Access .mat file containing matlab classes in python

asks about a MATLAB class object with a similar loadmat display:

MatlabOpaque([ (b'futureDS', b'MCOS', b'cStream', [[3707764736], ...])], 
  dtype=[('s0', 'O'), ('s1', 'O'), ('s2', 'O'), ('arr', 'O')])

There's nothing in Python that can decode this kind of MATLAB or Java object. If you need to send data back and forth between MATLAB and scipy stick with the basic MATLAB arrays, cells, and struct.

You could try to parse that arr list of numbers. Since they are all <256, they probably represent bytes. Can't you convert it to an ordinary MATLAB character string?

In [117]: x=[172, 237, 0, 5, 116, 0, 8, 49, 50, 58, 48, 49, 58, 53, 49]
In [118]: np.array(x,np.uint8).tostring()
Out[118]: b'\xac\xed\x00\x05t\x00\x0812:01:51'

The last 8 characters look like a time stamp. But do you know anything about java.lang.String objects?