Why am I unable to display characters from 128 to 255 on my Macintosh?

Why do I see blank placeholder characters when I print characters between 128 to 255 using the MATLAB functions CHAR or SPRINTF on a Macintosh ?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

The display of characters on the screen is largely dependent on the default character set of the X windows manager. In this case, the character set is probably US ASCII which is essentially a 7 bit character set and hence is unable to display characters beyond 128.

You can change your default character set to an 8 bit character set to eliminate this problem. To find the current character set, check the setting of the LANG environment variable. This can be done using the following command:

echo $LANG

The setting of LANG may be changed to any 8 bit character set such as 'en_US' to activate the display of characters from 128 to 255. The following command may be used to set LANG to en_US:

setenv LANG en_US