unicode2native — Convert Unicode text to encoded uint8 bytes in MATLAB and RunMat.

unicode2native(unicodestr) converts a string scalar or character vector into a 1xn uint8 row vector using UTF-8 by default. unicode2native(unicodestr, encoding) uses a named character encoding.

Syntax

bytes = unicode2native(unicodestr)
bytes = unicode2native(unicodestr, encoding)

Inputs

Returns

Errors

How unicode2native works

• String scalars and character row vectors are accepted as input text.
• The optional encoding argument can be a string scalar or character row vector.
• The default encoding is UTF-8.
• Encoding names are resolved through the runtime encoding library plus explicit Unicode encoders, including common aliases such as UTF-8, latin1, US-ASCII, windows-1252, Shift_JIS, UTF-16, and UTF-32.
• UTF-16 emits a little-endian byte-order mark followed by UTF-16LE bytes, matching MATLAB's documented output form.
• UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE produce UTF-16 bytes without a byte-order mark.
• UTF-32 emits a little-endian byte-order mark followed by UTF-32LE bytes. UTF-32LE and UTF-32BE produce UTF-32 bytes without a byte-order mark.
• Characters that cannot be represented in a legacy byte encoding are substituted with ? (63) instead of HTML numeric character references.
• The result is always a host uint8 tensor with shape 1xn, including 1x0 for empty input.
• Non-scalar string arrays, multi-row character arrays, unsupported encodings, non-text inputs, and extra arguments raise descriptive errors.

Examples

Convert Text With The Default Encoding

bytes = unicode2native("hello")

Expected output:

bytes =
    1x5 uint8 row vector
    104  101  108  108  111

Encode Text As UTF-8

bytes = unicode2native("hé", "UTF-8")

Expected output:

bytes =
    1x3 uint8 row vector
    104  195  169

Encode Text As Latin-1

bytes = unicode2native('café', 'latin1')

Expected output:

bytes =
    1x4 uint8 row vector
    99  97  102  233

Encode Text As UTF-16

bytes = unicode2native("hi", "UTF-16")

Expected output:

bytes =
    1x6 uint8 row vector
    255  254  104  0  105  0

Encode Text As UTF-32

bytes = unicode2native("A", "UTF-32")

Expected output:

bytes =
    1x8 uint8 row vector
    255  254  0  0  65  0  0  0

Using unicode2native with coding agents

Open a RunMat example with live inputs, then ask the agent to explain how unicode2native changes the result.

FAQ

Related Strings functions

Open-source implementation

Unlike proprietary runtimes, every RunMat function is open-source. Read exactly how unicode2native is executed, line by line, in Rust.

• View the source for unicode2native in Rust on GitHub
• Learn how the RunMat runtime works
• Found a bug? Open an issue with a minimal reproduction.

About RunMat

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