Reading high precision data into vpa variables

I am trying to read data with 60 digits of precision. If I use importdata, it is imported as double data type and I am losing precision. The documentation on vpa does not really help on importing data. Is it possible to read data and store them in arbitrary precision variables? Thank you,

[Stephen23]

Import as character and convert once in MATLAB memory.

Answer 1

[Raunak Gupta]

Hi,

As Stephen mentioned importing as double will always loose the precision because of the amount of precision is less in double. You can import the numeric values as character array. Note that even after that you can only store the values in a symbolic variable as mentioned here to not loose precision. From the character array you can convert it to cell array using cellstr and the cell array can be converted to a symbolic variable using cell2sym. This will all enable to do actual calculation on data rather than only a way to represent it.

This answer also provide some nice insights about your query.