How to convert char to uint8 and vice versa without changing the underlying data

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Answer 1

[James Tursa]

Simply:

c = original char array
u = uint8(c);

Or

u = original uint8 array
c = char(u);

If you mean you want to reinterpret one as the other without a data copy, you can't because MATLAB stores char data as 2-bytes per char and uint8 is of course 1 byte per element.

If you want to reinterpret the char as uint16 or vice-versa without a data copy, it can be done but not officially. You have to resort to mex hacks. E.g.,

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/17476-typecast-and-typecastx-c-mex-functions

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

I speculate that what you need is https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/unicode2native.html unicode2native() to convert characters to bytes, and native2unicode() to convert bytes to unicode. The functions offer a variety of ways of encoding character positions greater than 255, including UTF8 and UTF16LE and UTF16BE .