Leonard

txt2mat is excellent by being very straightforward in it's implementation. Could be the defacto standard within Matlab. Thanks Andreas for this.

If you are considering compiling a standalone application and deploying it using the MCR, you may want to consider the following:
I did not encounter any errors using this .m file while using it as long as MATLAB was installed on my machine (ver 7.5, BTW).
When deploying my executable to another machine and using the MCR (ver 7.7), the command line indicated the following:

Too many objects requested. Most likely cause is missing [ ] around left hand side that has a comma separated list expansion.

Error in ==> txt2mat at 519

515 %% Definitions
516
517 % find out matlab version as a decimal, up to the second dot:
518 v = ver('matlab');
519 vs= v.Version;
520 vsDotPos = [strfind(vs,'.'), Inf, Inf];
521 vn= str2double(vs(1:min(numel(vs),vsDotPos(2)-1)));

The .m file halted execution of my program because it was looking for a version # for MATLAB, which was not installed on the target machine. I patched the code by determining the matlab ver and editing the txt2mat.m as follows:

518 %v = ver('matlab');
519 vs = 7.5; %vs= v.Version;
520 vsDotPos = [strfind(vs,'.'), Inf, Inf];
521 vn= str2double(vs(1:min(numel(vs),vsDotPos(2)-1)));

Maybe it's possible to check for 'Matlab' on the target machine and/or the MCR and then handle this line appropriately.

Regards,
Len