I have done a project in Matlab and now I have uninstalled Matlab. Now, I need some reference of my project. I'm left with all the .mat files. I'm trying to open them in notepad and I'm getting unicode characters over there. My question is simple. How do I open the Matlab code in .mat file into notepad or some word processor? 

Answers: 

.mat files contain binary data, so you will not be able to open them easily with a word processor. There are some options for opening them outside of MATLAB: 

If all you need to do is look at the files, you could obtain Octave, which is a free, but somewhat slower implementation of MATLAB. You can refer to How do you open .mat files in Octave? for more information on the subject. You can get octave from http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html. The interface is very similar to MATLAB's. 

As NKN and Ergodicity mentioned, there are python libaries available for this as well.