How to Import vertexes and facet from a STL "ASCII" file ?

I'm searching for a script witch I can import the vertexes coordinate and the facet form an STL ASCII file. The only one I find for ASCCI and not for binary import only the vertexes and thus It's difficult to draw the surface after it.

Can somebody help ?

[Geoff Hayes]

Have you seen Eric Trautmann's fast STL import from the MATLAB File Exchange? It seems to output more than just the vertex coordinates.

[Pierrick Bersier]

Yes I seen it. But I did not get it to run properly. I had an error every time I tried.

[DGM]

The problem with FEX #30923 is that it can only read ASCII encoded files -- and only ones with windows-style line breaks. While those are its limitations, it doesn't actually test anything, so a binary encoded file, or an ASCII encoded file with unix line breaks will result in an unhelpful error message. It also has some other minor bugs which may silently cause problems depending on header content.

Internally, read_stl() from the IFIT toolbox (the accepted answer) uses the Trautmann decoder, but if it fails, it falls back to a different ASCII decoder. If the second decoder fails, it falls back to a binary decoder. It's kind of ridiculous that nowhere along the way is the encoding checked.

Answer 1

[Pierrick Bersier]

Meanwhile I fine here a script that works directly for me:

http://ifit.mccode.org/Downloads/ifit-1.5/Libraries/Loaders/private/read_stl.m

It gives out the vertexes, the faces and the normals.

[DGM]

Link is dead, but this is a different version. It's since moved again.

https://github.com/mccode-dev/iFit/blob/master/Libraries/Loaders/read_stl.m

Since R2018b, MATLAB has built-in STL tools

stlread

stlwrite

For legacy versions needing third-party tools, I'd recommend these tools. This explains why.