Why I can not read comments in Chinese in my Mfile?

In the past, I wrote a Mfile with very much comments in Chinese (after character %) in my PC with Windows7(x64) and Matlab 2013b. Last month, I have setup my PC with Windows10 and Matlab2015b but now although I can open this Mfile but I can not read those Chinese comments. Those Chinese comments's characters is not Chinese characters. Now I also have many Chinese fonts (include Chinese font I have used to write this Mfile) in my Windows/Fonts. Please let me know how I have to do to read those importan comments in my Mfile! Thank you very much!

[Christine Tobler]

That sounds very annoying. Can you attach a small example of such a file to this post? I have some different operating systems and MATLAB versions available, and could try where the problem comes from.

[sinh]

Christine Tobler! Thank you very much for your repply! Attach is a small Mfile of me. Now my laptop have two x64 operating systems Windows10 and Windows7 setup in C: and D: driver, but in both of two ooperating systems, Matlab can not read the comments in Chinese characters. In Matlab I also have setup Chinese in Preference/Fonts but I still could not read comment in Chinese. I think it is not easy to solve and I have spend lots of time but now I still could not solve it. I hope you try it and can give me a help. See you!

Answer 1

[Jan]

The Chinese characters appear directly, when I open the M-file with Notepad++, althought I did not install any Chinese fonts and run an English version of the OS (Win7 64). When I open the File in Matlab R2009a, R2011b and 2015b, the pure ASCII characters are shown.

See http://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/26244-unicode-support-in-builtin-editor

I had no success with http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/simulink/slref/slcharacterencoding.html. But I'm not sure.

You can try this - I'm not sure if this works reliably on all operating systems:

• At first check your locale value:

feature('locale')

• Then open the locale data XML file:

edit(fullfile(matlabroot, '/bin/lcdata.xml'))

• Replace (in my case):

<locale name="en_US" encoding="ISO-8859-1" xpg_name="en_US.ISO8859-1">

by

<locale name="en_US" encoding="UTF-8" xpg_name="en_US.UTF-8">

[sinh]

Jan Simon,

***Thank you very much for your reply! I have changed my "lcdata.xml', but I can not save my changes I had done! Please tell me what I have to do for this situation!

[Walter Roberson]

You need to be administrator to edit that file. You can display the file name in MATLAB and then go and find it in Windows Explorer and modify it with your favorite editor, using whatever technique you would normally use to change a protected file. Or you could start MATLAB with "run as administrator" and then you should be able to write the file.

[Paul McKenzie]

I'm running R2017a. When I go to edit 'lcdata.xml', there is no mention of any ISO-8859-1 encoding or UTF-8, except for the first line: version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ? I don't know what the question marks just inside the ends of that line mean. Is the encoding specification in a different place now?

[dodo oy]

As Paul said in R2017a edition, there's just a couple line in it and can't find

name="en_US" encoding="ISO-8859-1" xpg_name="en_US.ISO8859-1"

[Dayuan Tan]

As Paul and Dodo said, nothing like [name="en_US" encoding="ISO-8859-1" xpg_name="en_US.ISO8859-1" ] can be found. In R2017b editoin.

[Shaul Shvimmer]

This is everything that appear in my lcdata.xml file, using MATLAB 2020a in Windows 10, and still I'm getting the error message below when trying to use Hebrew in the matlab's editor, for using Hebrew in GUI.

How can this be solved ?

Thank you.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!-- MathWorks Locale Database -->
<!-- File Name: lcdata.xml -->
<!-- Copyright 2007-2016 The MathWorks, Inc. -->
<lcdata xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="lcdata.xsd">
<!-- Note: -->
<!-- This locale database is used to customize the MathWorks locale database. -->

<!-- Codeset entry example -->
<!--    <codeset> -->
<!--        <encoding name="StandardEncodingName" jvm_encoding="JavaEncodingName"> -->
<!--            <encoding_alias name="AliasName"/> -->
<!--        </encoding> -->
<!--    </codeset> -->

<!-- Locale entries example -->
<!--    <locale name="StandardLocaleName" encoding="EncodingName" xpg_name="XpgLocaleName"> -->
<!--        <alias name="AliasName"/> -->
<!--    "region_alias" is only for Mac -->
<!--        <region_alias name="RegionAliasName"/> -->
<!--    </locale> -->
</lcdata>

[Walter Roberson]

Shaul: Would it be possible for to attach a sample file that is giving this windows-1255 problem?

Answer 2

[YANG LI]

Same problem with lcdata.xml!!

Answer 3

[Kin Sung Chan]

Well, I use VSCode to open the Matlab .m file, and resave with GBK encoding. (bottom right button of the VSCode interface next to Spaces) (Well, I try with different types of encoding, and only this one works)

After that, Matlab can display the Chinese characters with no issues.

[Kin Sung Chan]