I have written matlab programs that produce plots and tables for chemical substances. I get my input mostly from excel tables and a local MySql database. My problem is quite a few substance names contain greek letters.
My problem is I want to create plots that use exactly the names specified by my collegues. And also create tables that show the correct symbol.
An example:
If I create an excel file containing: "α-Methylstyrol" in the first cell and read it with [~,~,tmp] = xlsread('test.xlsx')
. tmp will contain '(box with question mark)-Methylstyrol'
. If I use the string in a plot (title(tmp)
) it will be shown as: '(right arrow)-Methylstyrol'
So far I tried the native2unicode
and unicode2native
commands on the string but there is no effect. Also I tried replacing the characters but the number of characters I need to replace is growing way too fast for me - so I'm really hoping there would be a more systematic way.
(We know there are also names that wouldn't contain greek letters - but we try to adhere to some guidelines which prefer these names.)