Storing Special Characters in Cell String

I am trying to create a cell array of strings to pass to the MATLAB Report Generator and convert to a table. I want to insert special characters (specifically lowercase sigma) but am having trouble. I tried using '\sigma' I was able to add the degree symbol (circle superscript) and <= using

char(n) % n is numeric ascii code

but I cannot find the ascii code for lowercase sigma. Below is an example of how I am assigning the string to the cell array.

L3C1(1,4) = {['% Count ',char(242),num2str(TempLimit),char(176),'F']};

Is there a better way to store special characters in a string? I am using MATLAB R2011a (64 bit), Windows 7.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Sean

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma#Unicode

You can see there that are several different sigma. If you want the one that is typically used to represent standard deviation, then that would be "Greek Lower-Case Letter Sigma", unicode +03C3 . In MATLAB that would be char(hex2dec('03C3'))

However, I do not know whether the report generator is able to handle characters beyond char(255). If it is, then it might be necessary to create a UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding of the character. The UTF-8 encoding would be

char(unicode2native(char(hex2dec('03c3')),'UTF-8'))

[Sean]

char(hex2dec('03C3')) displays (#)

char(unicode2native(char(hex2dec('03c3')),'UTF-8')) displays (I# with two dots above the capital I)

Answer 2

[Daniel Shub]

char(963)

[Sean]

char(963) shows the number sign (#)

[Amit Singh]

Where can I find the list of matlab ascii characters? I want to use characters relating to audio signals namely pause, play and stop.

Answer 3

[Sean]

Could this be an issue with my computer?

char(963)

displays (#) sign. Do different OS interpret character codes differently?

[Walter Roberson]

MATLAB itself can be configured for different fonts and different character encodings.

What does

'σ' + 0

show for you ?

[Sean]

sigma plus zero

[Walter Roberson]

Evaluate 'σ' + 0 as an expression at the MATLAB command prompt. You should get back a number (e.g., 963). That number is the number you would use in char() to create the sigma. Or, of course, you could just try coding 'σ' where you want sigma.