MATLAB: How to insert a tab character in the character array

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I want to insert a tab character in a character array. Is there a function such as 'newline' which adds a tab character instead of a new line character?

Best Answer

As of MATLAB R2017a, there is no function similar to 'newline' which specifically adds a horizontal tab character. However you can use the following workarounds:

1. For adding horizontal tab character

>> sprintf('\t')

2. For adding certain number, say 5, of whitespaces:

>> blanks(5)

3. For a complete list of supported special characters, you can refer to the 'Special Characters' section in the following documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/formatting-strings.html#bq0z6xa

Related Solutions

MATLAB: How to concatenate two newline characters together

The behavior you are seeing is because MATLAB uses the "+" operator as plus operator, and for characters, that means converting them to their ASCII values, in this case "10" and summing those values.

Strings are an exception to this where "s" + "s" will concatenate the strings.

To concatenate two or more characters, I recommend using the "[ ]" bracket syntax. Each character group separated by either spaces or commas inside the brackets will be concatenated together.

So the code below would return what you would expect.

>> res = [newline, newline]

res =

    '
     '

>> res = [newline newline]

res =

    '
     '

To implement a string version of the newline function, you could write a file called "stringnewline.m" which contains the following:

function out = stringnewline
    out = string(newline);
end

If you add that file to the MATLAB path, you will be able to use a string form of the newline function.

MATLAB: How to write special characters in XML files using “xmlwrite”

Please note that, as far as having "&" characters in an XML file, this is technically not supported according to the XML Specification, and a standards-compliant XML encoder should always escape "&" characters. Please refer to the following snippet from the XML Specification (<https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#syntax>):

"The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) must not appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they must be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " & " and " < " respectively."

You can use the Unicode notation for the special characters instead of the numerical representation that you used. For instance, the "é" character is represented by the number 233 in Unicode. Please find below a simple example that shows how to write special characters in XML files using Unicode characters.

>> docNode = com.mathworks.xml.XMLUtils.createDocument('test');
>> curr_node = docNode.createElement('testitem');
>> curr_node.appendChild(docNode.createTextNode(native2unicode(233))); % 233 is the Unicode for the accented e
>> docNode.getDocumentElement.appendChild(curr_node)
>> xmlwrite('testAccent.xml',docNode);

The code above generates the file "testAccent.xml" which shows as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<test>
   <testitem>é</testitem>
</test>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: How to concatenate two newline characters together

MATLAB: How to write special characters in XML files using “xmlwrite”

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