OK so I needed to import a .csv table into Matlab, but knew it could be tricky. A friend wrote some Matlab code for me once to do this and it was a page-and-half of fiddly code, filled with string trimming and required quite prescriptive column and row names. 

I knew pandas could handle csv files nicely, but was keen to keep things in Matlab since the rest of the code was there etc. So I google for the best way to do it and got this. Its a whole blog called Abandon Matlab on how awful Matlab is! Has chapter and verse about how Matlab does not handle csv files with mixed data... I did not go looking for this.