Why does OCTAVE produce this symbol when using strcat

I apologize if I'm not supposed to ask a question about OCTAVE but I couldn't find a forum specific to OCTAVE

I'm trying to concatenate the contents of two cell arrays using strcat and I get the following display (see attached image):

Here is my code which produces a weird symbol at the start of each for of array "b"

>> LET =["C,C#,D,D#,E,F,F#,G,G#,A,A#,B"]
>> LETsplit = ostrsplit(LET, ",")
>> LETtrans=LETsplit';
>> LETtrans=LETsplit';
>> C=cell(12,12);
>> C(1:12,1)=LETsplit{1,1};
>> C(1:12,2)=LETsplit{1,2};
>> C(1:12,3)=LETsplit{1,3};
>> C(1:12,4)=LETsplit{1,4};
>> C(1:12,5)=LETsplit{1,5};
>> C(1:12,6)=LETsplit{1,6};
>> C(1:12,7)=LETsplit{1,7};
>> C(1:12,8)=LETsplit{1,8};
>> C(1:12,9)=LETsplit{1,9};
>> C(1:12,10)=LETsplit{1,10};
>> C(1:12,11)=LETsplit{1,11};
>> C(1:12,12)=LETsplit{1,12};

>>  b=strcat(2,C(1:12,2),LETtrans);

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

You have

b=strcat(2,C(1:12,2),LETtrans)

which requests to put char(2) as the first character of the output.

strcat() does not accept a dimension number: it always concatenates horizontally. It is not the same as cat(): cat() accepts a dimension number.

[aweller3]

Thank you so much. I must have confused strcat() with cat().