`unicode2native`

Converts text to bytes in a given character encoding.

Category: Language Fundamentals > Data Types

Syntax

b = unicode2native(str)

Encodes with the default encoding of the system.

b = unicode2native(str, encoding)

Encodes with the named encoding, such as 'UTF-8' or 'ISO-8859-1'.

Description

Text in MATLAB is Unicode, but files and network protocols carry bytes in a specific encoding. unicode2native produces those bytes. In UTF-8, a takes one byte and é takes two (195 169), while in 'ISO-8859-1' both take one byte. The number of bytes is therefore not always the number of characters.

The inverse operation is native2unicode.

Input arguments

str: Character vector or string.
encoding: Name of the character encoding.

Output arguments

b: Row vector of class uint8 with the encoded bytes.

Example

Bytes in two encodings

b = unicode2native('aé', 'UTF-8')
class(b)
unicode2native('é', 'ISO-8859-1')

Output

b = 1×3 uint8 row vector

    97   195   169
ans = 'uint8'
ans = 1×2 uint8 row vector

   195   169

unicode2native