Why does hex2num('F') equal -3.1050e+231?

According to the documentation, "Fewer than 16 characters are padded on the right with zeros" so it must be an endian thing.

Bet that causes a lot of bugs. What function gets the expected result of F = 15?

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Try hex2dec instead:

>> hex2dec('F')
ans = 15

"What function gets the expected result of F = 15?"

You can easily find these functions yourself: clicking up one level from hex2num in the contents takes you to this page, where all such conversion functions are listed:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/data-type-conversion.html

"Why does hex2num('F') equal -3.1050e+231?...so it must be an endian thing."

Nope. As the documentation states, it is because the input is considered to be an IEEE formated number:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754