Starting in MATLAB R2020a, the "fileread" function along with many other high-level and low-level IO functions use automatic character set detection to determine the encoding of the file. The encoding is determined automatically. Note that this encoding detection adds some overhead to the "fileread" operation.
In cases where additional overhead is undesirable, or where the encoding is already known, an alternative workflow is to use "fopen" to specify the encoding of the file and use other low-level IO functions to read the data with this encoding. For example, the following will open a file for reading with UTF-8 encoding:
>> fid = fopen('test.txt', 'r', 'n', 'UTF-8'); % Set encoding to be UTF-8
More information on automatic file encoding can be found in the File I/O documentation:
