Single-byte characters?

Hi!

If I understand correctly, characters in Matlab are always defined as two-byte variables? Is it possible to define a single-byte character?

I'm trying to communicate with an external device, and I need to send it a character string of N bytes = N characters. At the moment, however, when I define my string in Matlab I always get 2*N bytes.

Is it possible to create strings of characters where each character is stored as one byte?

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Patrick Kalita]

Does this work for you?

>> s = uint8('hello world')

s =

    104  101  108  108  111   32  119  111  114  108  100

>> whos
  Name      Size            Bytes  Class    Attributes

    s         1x11               11  uint8              

>>

[John D'Errico]

And of course, char(s) recovers the characters themselves.

Answer 2

[Jan]

If the function expects a CHAR, you must provide 2-byte characters. 1-byte characters are simply not CHARs and will be refused by the called function.

Please post any details about the program used for "communication with an external device".

Answer 3

[Lipa]

Thanks for the reply. I tried what you suggested before, but the problem is that my external function that I'm calling requiers a character string as input. I know that generally (single-byte) "char" should be the same as "uint8", but this doesn't seem to be the case in Matlab? When I'm calling with uint8, I get the error: "Parameter can not be converted to a string."

So it seems that the input must be of "char" type, yet only one byte should be reserved for each character in the string...

[Patrick Kalita]

Which function is giving you the error? Is it something provided by MATLAB or a Toolbox?

Answer 4

[Laura Proctor]

You can try the function unicode2native which will convert your characters into numeric bytes depending on the encoding scheme that you select:

bytes = unicode2native('hello world','UTF-8')

But I don't know that this will resolve the issue. Can you copy and paste the exact command you are using as well as the error message?