use comma as decimal seperator

Hi,

i have a simple question and this is my last try, as i've been searching the web all morning:

Is there a way to use comma as decimal seperator instead of a period/dot in matlab?

Even maybe only in figures/axis format?

Thanks, any help is gratefully appreciated!

ps: i set the reagional settings in Windows/MacOS (using both) to German (--> Comma)

Answer 1

[Jan]

The answer is easy: no.

Using the comma is a German feature. In the world of scientific computing the dot is always used as decimal separator. Only Excel is affected by this setting, and in consequence importing data from Excel to MATLAB can be substantially irritating.

[Aurelien Queffurust]

Not only German but also a French feature ;)

[Jan]

@Aurelien: In deed? After a short web research I found out, that my opinion about the freaky Germans is wrong, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark .

Comma users: Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada (French-speaking), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia (comma used officially, but both forms are in use elsewhere), Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg (uses both marks officially), Macau (in Portuguese text), Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa (officially[14]), Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam.

[Aurelien Queffurust]

lol

[Antonio Napoli]

Italian too

[Jan]

@Antonio: Of course, "Italy" is contained in the list of countries already.

[Enri]

" importing data from Excel to MATLAB can be substantially irritating."

1. Amen
2. Exporting data from Matlab to Excel is irritating as well.

[Boris Povazay]

Well - the decimal comma is no German feature, but the decimal point is an US-of-American one...

have a look: Wikipedia Decimal_separator

and as we all know the US suffers from its own imperialistic weigth, not being able to accept that the world has moved on - forward towards a metric international system. ;-)

[Stephen23]

" importing data from Excel to MATLAB can be substantially irritating... Exporting data from Matlab to Excel is irritating as well."

Out of personal curiousity, would you care to explain specifically why?

[Walter Roberson]

IMHO, MATLAB could make it easier to control cell format and insertion of macros in .xls* files.

And perhaps even make it easier to cram multiple distinct tables inside the same worksheet, since some people prefer to build spreadsheets more for presentation purposes than for machine processing.

My own work has never needed to insert an excel macro, and has seldom needed to change the format for a column or area. The times I have wanted to change the format for a column, it has (as best I can recall) had to do with wanting to change a time representation format.

Answer 2

[Daniel Shub]

You might want to check out this link:

http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/formatting-numbers/

Answer 3

[TAB]

May be this can help you

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/241400

Answer 4

[Patrick]

Thanks anyway, i fear Jan Simon is right ;-( poor old Europe

[Boris Povazay]

Well, the opposite is true ... poor old imperial system and stubborn USA. 🤔

Answer 5

[Adam]

Look there (just for function plots): http://frommyplayground.com/2012/12/decimal-comma-in-matlab-plots/

Answer 6

[Daniel Gregorius]

Hey. When dealing with this problem, this is what I came up with. It's an extract of a GUI. People kept entering values with comma (,) instead of a point (.) and then it didn't work so I thought of the following code, that seems to work. I am still not sure if I have thought of everything and this is probably alot more complicated than it should be. Hopefully this still helps. It basically converts input with comma as decimal seperator into a value seperated by decimal point.

x=str2num(get(handles.point,'String'));%get point - everything alright if the delimiter is a .
if size(x,2)>1 %it's not a . but a ,
  strx=get(handles.point,'String'); %need to check for sign
  splitstrx=strsplit(a1,','); %try to extract length of 2nd string, divide x(2) by 10^strlength
  if strx(1)=='-'
      x=x(1)-x(2)/10^strlength(splitstrx(1,2)); %it's negative, need to substract 2nd string
  else
      x=x(1)+x(2)/10^strlength(splitstrx(1,2)); %it's positive
  end
end

[Stephen23]

x = str2double(strrep(get(handles.point,'String'),',','.'))

Or in a more general case:

x = str2double(strrep(str,',','.'))

[Govind Narayan Sahu]

This works perfectly fine for me. Short and simple.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 7

[Johannes Kalliauer]

For Matrixes to CSV I recommend on linux/Mac-machines (On Windows you have to install sed)

writematrix(MyMatrix,filename,'Delimiter',';')
system(['exec sed -i "s/\./,/g" ',filename]);