Programming and Data Types

Converting Characters to Numeric Values

Character arrays store each character as a 16-bit numeric value. Use the double function to convert strings to their numeric values, and char to revert to character representation.

name = double(name)

name =

    84  104  111  109  97  115  32  82  46  32  76  101  101

name = char(name)
name =

Thomas R. Lee

Use str2num to convert a character array to the numeric value represented by that string.

str = '37.294e-1';
val = str2num(str)

val =

    3.7294

Creating Two-Dimensional Character Arrays

Cell Arrays of Strings