Why do Turkish Characters appear as question marks "?" in MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a) on Windows?

When certain characters e.g. Turkish, Greek etc. are typed into MATLAB editor and published as HTML or using MATLAB Report Generator, some of the characters appear as question marks " ? ". The same issue is observed when the MATLAB program is saved and reopened.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

MATLAB can use the UTF-8 character sets for different languages, however, MATLAB uses the Operating System specific User and System Locale and Regional settings for Locale initialization.

A Locale is a sub-set of user environment definition and defines language territory and codeset. Locale initialization mechanism in the MATLAB process retrieves the user specified locale setting from the operating system and sets it in the MATLAB process.

If the specified locale is not supported by MATLAB, the locale initialization mechanism sets the MATLAB default locale, which is en_US.US_ASCII.

To workaround this issue, the appropriate Locale settings should be defined in the system settings.

For example, in Windows XP, do the following:

1. Go to Start--> Control Panel--> Regional and Language Options.

2. Set the correct language for user locale settings in the Regional Options tab.

3. Set the correct language for system locale settings in the Advanced tab.

For information on how to set user and system locales on Mac and UNIX platforms, refer to the related solutions below.