how to read *.dat matlab file

[detech]

I have *.dat file which were saved from scope, "save as matlab file". It is with extention "dat". I can open it with word. It is just one coulum of numerical data, it should be waveform.

Now I want use labview to read it to a waveform. How do i do it? please help

Thanks

Liming

[detech]

By the way, this is a 20 mb big files, about 600000 data. Is any limit for labview to read it?

[smercurio_fc]

If it's just a column of numbers you can just use the standard File I/O functions to read the file. There's plenty of examples that ship with LabVIEW that show you how to use the File I/O functions.

As for limitations, the main limitation is the amount of memory you have if you intend to read the whole thing into an array. 600,000 elements is not that much, though it depends on the datatype that you're using. If each element is a DBL, that's 8 bytes, so it's 600,000 x 8 = 4800000 bytes = 4.5 MBytes of RAM. That's not all that much, but depending on what else you're doing... You may want to look over this KB article on Managing Large Data Sets in LabVIEW.