Reading MatLab files in python w/ scipy

Question

I'm using python w/ scipy package to read the MatLab file.

However it takes too long and crashes.

The Dataset is about 50~ MB in size

Is there any better way to read the data and form an edge list ?

My python code

import scipy.io as io
data=io.loadmat('realitymining.mat')
print data

Answer 1

You could just save each field of the struct in a different text file, eg:

save('friends.txt', '-struct', 'network', 'friends', '-ascii')

and load each file separately from python

friends = numpy.loadtxt('friends.txt')

which loads instantly.