Matlab for Linux - language computations

I am trying to textscan .txt files in French into MATLAB (to do language computations) and I noticed that if I do this on my windows machine, where the default MATLAB character encoding is set as 'windows-1252', this works just fine. All special characters in the language are encoded correctly and then always recognized. However, if I try to do this on a Linux machine, the special characters are not recognized, and are replaced either by an empty square or the character '?'. I need this to be operational on a Linux machine, and have no idea how to make this happen.

What I have tried: opening a new session of MATLAB and typing in: slCharacterEncoding( 'Windows-1252') . With this change the special characters are not recognized. I also tried specifying the encoding as 'UTF-8' but this also did not work. Maybe this is the right approach but I did not do it correctly, I really don't know.

I was wondering if anyone has encountered something like this or has suggestions of what I can try or anyone I can talk to that would have suggestions?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

fid = fopen('YourFile.txt', 'rt', 'n', 'Windows-1252');

datacell = textscan(fid, ..... );

fclose(fid);