Why am I experiencing problems with the International Components for Unicode (ICU) libraries in MATLAB 7.0 (R14)?

I am having problems with Unicode characters in MATLAB 7.0 (R14). This problem may exhibit the following symptoms:

1. The MATLAB path becomes corrupt.

2. REGEXPREP fails to operate correctly.

3. Excel files cannot be imported using the Import Wizard.

4. The LOWER or UPPER functions fail to convert strings to lower or upper cases.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This bug has been fixed for Release 14 SP1 (R14SP1). For previous releases, read below for any possible workarounds:

MATLAB uses the International Components for Unicode (ICU) libraries to perform some of its string manipulation. Other applications (such as FalconView) which use those libraries may set the system environment variable ICU_DATA. If the other product uses a different version of ICU and sets this environment variable globally, it is likely that MATLAB will exhibit bizarre behavior, particularly related to string handling. To restore string-handling functionality in MATLAB, run MATLAB from a shell that has no ICU_DATA variable set. Here are instructions:

1. Find the location of MATLAB.EXE. In this example, we assume the MATLAB.EXE file exists in the following directory:

d:\Applications\MATLAB7\bin\win32

2. Create a new text file

3. Add the following lines to the text file...

 set ICU_DATA=

 start d:\Applications\MATLAB7\bin\win32\matlab.exe

4. Rename the text file to have a .bat extension, i.e. MATLAB.bat

Double-clicking the BAT file should launch MATLAB with the correct libraries

Alternately, you can launch MATLAB from a shell that has ICU_DATA set to the directory that contains matlab.exe. In this example, that would be

set ICU_DATA=d:\Applications\MATLAB7\bin\win32

start d:\Applications\MATLAB7\bin\win32\matlab.exe