How do I use Greek letters in fprintf ? Since fprintf uses \ in its argument, I cant write Greek letters in it. Thanks

 fprintf(' \lambda %g\t',10)
 Warning: Escape sequence 'l' is not valid.See 'help sprint' for valid escape sequences.

Answer 1

[Arpan Bhowmik]

Try escaping the escape character:

fprintf('\\lambda %g\t',10)

I know this works to get Greek characters in sprintf.

[Vinayak Pathak]

Worked! Thanks alot

[PULAK Kumer]

It doesnot work for my matlab2020 online version

[Walter Roberson]

This sequence will not produce a visible lambda symbol on the command window in any version of MATLAB.

The \lambda that is output is something that would get used in a LaTex environment, and probably would not be useful unless you are planning to copy and paste it for use in LaTeX.

[Syed Ali]

Thanks Arpan, solved my problem

[Samuel]

Thanks!!

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

fprintf('\x03bb %g\t', 10)

[ebrahimina]

Thank you, but it doesn't work

[Walter Roberson]

It does in R2013b or later on OS-X; it might require R2014b or later on MS Windows.

On MS Windows it might depend on which codepage you are set to.

Also, is this for display, or is this for writing into a file, or is this for sending over a serial port?

[ebrahimina]

My OS is win.7 and I have Matlab R2011b. I need it for display the value of lambda.

[Walter Roberson]

Are you willing to change your system code page to Windows-1253 ?

[ebrahimina]

How can I do that?

[Walter Roberson]

When I tested in R2011b in Windows 10, I was not able to get this to work.

I do not have a Windows 7 system set up at the moment. I have some Windows 8 systems set up, but my virtual machine software is having trouble starting them -- I think I must have moved them around on disk or something like that.

The only hope I see at the moment is that you might be able to change your Preferences -> Fonts to select Lucinda Unicode as your font for the command window, and then emit char(955).

That did not work for me on Windows 10, but the particular resources I was looking at did not happen to go as late as Windows 10; it did name that font as the only built-in Microsoft Unicode font across a variety of Windows versions.

To change code pages, see http://knowledgebase.progress.com/articles/Article/4677

Options include: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_737 Code page 737, char(162)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_869 Code page 869, char(229)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1253 Code page 1253, char(235)

[ebrahimina]

Hello, Walter Roberson and thank you for answering my questions. I found these pages about my topic.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/10874-show-symbol-in-command-window https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/83114-print-latex-greek-chars-to-commandline

I think we can not write Greek alphabet in command window or at least I can't do it. I appreciate you so much.

[Steven Dawson]

Thanks for having this solution mate!

Was trying to get the angle character ∠, now I got it with "\x2220".

[Joshua Brooks]

Was looking how to do this exactly. thank you!

[Jerry Malone]

Just curious, why does this work?

>> fprintf('(RLS) \x03bb: [%4.6E, %4.6E, %4.6E]\n',lambda);

(RLS) λ: [9.999000E-01, 9.999800E-01, 9.999000E-01]

But this does not?

>> disp(sprintf('(RLS) \\lambda: [%4.6E, %4.6E, %4.6E]\n',lambda))

(RLS) \lambda: [9.999000E-01, 9.999800E-01, 9.999000E-01]

Nor does this:

>> disp(sprintf('(RLS) \lambda: [%4.6E, %4.6E, %4.6E]\n',lambda))

Warning: Escaped character '\l' is not valid. See 'doc sprintf' for supported special

characters.

(RLS)

[Walter Roberson]

@Jerry Malone

The character vector \lambda is coding for TeX or LaTeX, and is completely unknown to sprintf() or fprintf() or compose() or to the MATLAB command window generally.

\x03bb is using the documented fprintf() / sprintf() facility to encode character positions in the current font (which is not necessarily Unicode)

You might also have seen something like

syms lambda
'(RLS)', disp(lambda), '[9.999000E-01, 9.999800E-01, 9.999000E-01]'

ans = '(RLS)'

λ

ans = '[9.999000E-01, 9.999800E-01, 9.999000E-01]'

This only works with the Symbolic Toolbox when it is being displayed in LiveScript mode or being displayed in MATLAB Online or MATLAB Answers. And it is difficult to insert into the middle of a string.

Answer 3

[Image Analyst]

I can get plenty of Greek symbols in the command window doing this:

>> str = sprintf('%c ', 900:1000)

Just pick the right number.

[Walter Roberson]

... but not in R2011b

[Josh Philipson]

..nor in R2020a

[Image Analyst]

I'd call the Mathworks on that, because for me in R2020a, I do see lots of Greek symbols:

If you don't see what I do above, then maybe there is some kind of regionalization of the operating system that is not allowing you to see them. The Mathworks should be able to talk you through it. Come back here and let us know how they fixed it for you.

[DGM]

Works for me in R2009b. Maybe that's more of a system problem than the version?

Answer 4

[Spencer Cochran]

Leverage the Unicode representation of the Greek Letter.

'lambda' in Unicode is the Hex number: '039B' (You can find Unicode lists online).

Convert from the Hex Unicode character string -> to decimal -> to char -> concatenate with other character strings.

Lambda = char(hex2dec('039B')); 
Omega = char(937); 
disp(['disp Function:    ' Lambda '  |  ' Omega]);                                                                 
fprintf(['fprintf Function: ' Lambda '  |  ' Omega '\n']);

This code gives:

disp Function: Λ | Ω

fprintf Function: Λ | Ω

There may be more elegant ways of doing this, but it works for me!

[Walter Roberson]

This is the same basic approach as I suggested above where I suggested

fprintf('\x03bb %g\t', 10)

The \x03bb codes for U+03BB which is λ (lower-case Lambda).

The difficulty with this turned out to be that the person asking the question was using an older version of Windows that did not have the right font or code page activated. It took Microsoft a long time to catch up on Unicode (if they even have caught up yet.)