`native2unicode`

Converts bytes in a given character encoding to a MATLAB character vector.

Category: Language Fundamentals > Data Types

Syntax

str = native2unicode(bytes)

Interprets bytes in the default encoding.

str = native2unicode(bytes, charset)

Interprets bytes using the named encoding.

Description

Text read from files or the network often arrives as raw bytes. native2unicode decodes those bytes according to an encoding, so multi-byte sequences become single characters. In UTF-8, for example, the two bytes 195 169 are one character, the letter e with an acute accent (code 233).

The inverse operation is unicode2native.

Input arguments

bytes: Numeric vector (for example uint8) or char vector holding encoded bytes.
charset: Encoding name such as 'UTF-8' or 'ISO-8859-1'.

Output arguments

str: Char row vector with the decoded text.

Example

native2unicode(uint8([72 101 108 108 111]))
double(native2unicode(uint8([195 169]), 'UTF-8'))

Output

ans = 'Hello'
ans = 233

The second line shows the code point of the decoded character.

native2unicode