Why does char give me an empty output?

>> b=[1,2,3,4,5]

b =

     1     2     3     4     5

>> char(b)

ans =

this is what I enter and the output is five little empty boxes. I've tried this with several numeric vectors and matrices and it does the same thing with varying numbers of boxes. It also does this if I manually input the vector. It was working previously, and then it wasn't I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

Characters for ASCII codes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are all unprintable characters, so nothing prints. The conversion did take place, but the result is not printable (displayable). The characters are:

1   01   SOH   Start of heading
2   02   STX   Start of text
3   03   ETX   End of text
4   04   EOT   End of trans.
5   05   ENQ   Enquiry

[Geri Spinosa]

Thank you, that explains it, not sure what I was doing before, but I'll figure it out.

[Stephen23]

About halfway down this page are two tables, one with the unprintable and one the printable ASCII characters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

Answer 2

[Joseph Cheng]

char() converts the values into the 7-bit ASCII characters. use num2str() or the other equivalent functions to convert numbers to a string.

[Geri Spinosa]

Well, thank you for answering, but I'm not trying to convert it to a string, I'm just trying to display the elements as a column vector.

Answer 3

[C.J. Harris]

This is because ASCII characters 1 to 7 are not visible characters.

See the 'Dec' column: http://www.asciitable.com/