Programming and Data Types

Character Arrays

In MATLAB, the term string refers to an array of characters. MATLAB represents each character internally as its corresponding numeric value. Unless you want to access these values, however, you can simply work with the characters as they display on screen.

This section covers:

• Creating Character Arrays
• Creating Two-Dimensional Character Arrays
• Converting Characters to Numeric Values

Creating Character Arrays

Specify character data by placing characters inside a pair of single quotes. For example, this line creates a 1-by-13 character array called name.

• name = 'Thomas R. Lee';
  

In the workspace, the output of whos shows

• Name       Size         Bytes  Class
  
  name       1x13            26  char array
  

You can see that a character uses two bytes of storage internally.

The class and ischar functions show name's identity as a character array.

• class(name)
  ans =
     char
  
  ischar(name)
  ans =
      1
  

You can also join two or more character arrays together to create a new character array. Use either the string concatenation function, strcat, or the MATLAB concatenation operator, [], to do this. The latter preserves any trailing spaces found in the input arrays.

• name = 'Thomas R. Lee';
  title = ' Sr. Developer';
  
  strcat(name,',',title)
  ans =
     Thomas R. Lee, Sr. Developer
  

You can also concatenate strings vertically with strvcat.

Function Summary

Creating Two-Dimensional Character Arrays