MATLAB: Textscan can’t read letters with acents

accentsi18nletterstextscan

Hi I am trying to read a csv file of names which include some names with accented letters such as the lower case version of "Á" (can't find a lower case a with an accent on my keyboard). Textscan just ignores the character. Any ideas how we can read these characters with text?

Best Answer

A .CSV file is an ASCII file without character set encoding information. You might need to experiment with different encodings to stumble upon the one the file was created with.

See the documentation for the optional encodingIn parameter to fopen for a discussion.

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txtisalpha = ismember(txt, ['a':'z', 'A':'Z']);

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This bug has been fixed for Release 14 (R14). For previous releases, please read below for any possible workarounds:

In order for the Simulink to correctly handle strings containing non-ASCII characters, the model loader will pre-scan an MDL-file for non-ASCII characters. If any such characters are found and are inconsistent with the current MATLAB encoding setting, model loading will stop and the warning described above will be displayed.

The SLCHARACTERENCODING function forces Simulink to use a different character encoding than the one that MATLAB is using. If it is likely that the extended characters come from a European character set, use the command:

slCharacterEncoding('ISO-8859-1');

If it is likely that the extended characters come from an Asian character set, use the command:

slCharacterEncoding('Shift_JIS');

This command will only be active for the current MATLAB session. If you will frequently be loading models from a non-ASCII character set, you should place this command in your startup.m file so that it is loaded every time that MATLAB is started. See the following URL for more information on how to do this:

http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/startup.shtml

Note that the documentation for SLCHARACTERENCODING command is missing in Simulink 6.0 (R14). The following is the documentation for SLCHARACTERENCODING.

 SLCHARACTERENCODING: Change the MATLAB character set encoding. 
If you have a model containing non-ASCII characters, you need to change the MATLAB 
 character set encoding to be compatible with these characters before loading the model.  
 Currently, we support: US-ASCII, UTF-8, Shift_JIS, ISO-8859-1.
    Note: You need to close all open models or libraries before changing the MATLAB
    character set encoding except when changing from 'US-ASCII' to another encoding.
    Examples:
    slCharacterEncoding()                  % return the current MATLAB character
                                                          % set encoding
    slCharacterEncoding('Shift_JIS')       % change the MATLAB character set encoding
                                                                % to Shift_JIS

Best Answer

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