Output of sprintf - string?

Hi everyone,

on Matlab's documentation I read that sprintf is a function which takes as input data and returns a string. If I write:

x=sprintf('%d',2222)

the output has 1x4 dimension, thus is a character array and not a string (i use Matlab 2015). Why?

Thank you.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Because MATLAB only introduced the string class in R2016b, but previously any character array with size 1xN was called a "string". So for historic reasons there are many references to "strings" that are actually references to 1xN char arrays.

For example this includes the functions sprintf, cellstr, and iscellstr.

For the function sprintf:

• Versions R2016a and before: The output is a 1xN char array.
• Versions R2016b and later: The output class is the same as that of the first input.

https://www.mathworks.com/examples/matlab/mw/matlab-ex32410134-create-string-arrays