How to assign a Russian string to a variable

When I am doing something like

'a'-0

I get the ASCII code of the character, 97 in this example. However for Russian letters I always get 26. How can I make Matlab accept Russian letters?

Eventually I need it to accept Russian strings obtained with

urlread

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

When you read from a web page, you should get back a header that looks similar to

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

If charset is utf-8 then the implication is that all possible Unicode characters could be returned, and that the byte values used will correspond to the Unicode standards. You would process this by using native2unicode or unicode2native .

If, though, charset is koi8-r or iso-8859-5 then you will need to do character translation. The translation table for koi8-r is shown at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI8-R . The middle value for each cell of the table is the Unicode code point for the character, expressed (as is traditional) as four hex digits. For example, there Д shows 0414 hex, which is decimal 1044, and char(1044) in the command window does show Д if you are using the default character set for MATLAB (but people who have their computer set to languages other than English might be set up for other character sets.)

[Kotya Karapetyan]

Aha, this is already something.

a = char(1044);

a-0

returns 1044 and not 26.

However I still do not see the letters. I'd like to see them.

I think my computer is set to English. I'm using Win 7. Control Panel > Region and Language > Format is United Kingdom, Location is also United Kingdom. "Current language for non-Unicode programs" is "English (United Kingdom)".

How can I check what is the character set Matlab is using? Can I change it within Matlab?

[Walter Roberson]

Please see http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/9738-problem-opening-files-containing-special-characters for an example of checking it. I do not know if it can be changed within MATLAB.