show symbol in command window

Hello,

in Matlab i use \phi to display the greek letter phi; or x_t to display a subscript.

I use it in plots and it works. However in the command window i am not able to use it.

Is it possible or not?

armin

thank u

[Muhammad Raheel]

Hello..My question is how to convert micro farad into farad tell me please

[Walter Roberson]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

In the time since the question was originally asked, an additional possibility has arisen.

If you are using the Symbolic Toolbox inside LiveScript, and you use a symbolic variable name that is the English spelling of a Greek letter, then if you display the contents of an expression involving the variable, then the variable will be formatted as a symbol. This applies only to LiveScript and only to the content, not to the name of the variable holding the content.

syms theta(t)
theta_dot = sin(theta)^2

theta_dot(t) = 

syms phi_ddot
eqn = phi_ddot == sin(theta)^2

eqn(t) = 

the display of "theta_dot =" would be plain text and then the sin(theta)^2 would be nicely formatted. "theta_dot" would not be nicely formatted because... well, design decision really. But the display of eqn would display "eqn =" as plain text without trying to format it, but the phi_ddot is on the right side, part of the expression, so it would be nicely formatted. So in practice you can get both sides formatted if you make it an equality to be displayed.

Answer 2

[Aider]

You can use fprintf with unicode characters, the syntax is \xN, where N is the hex number that identifies the desired character.

I found this document very usedful, https://people.utm.my/musamm/files/2020/05/Chapter-6-Input-and-Output-Data.pdf

Example:

fprintf(['degree plus_minus alpha beta epsilon    rho \n', '     \xB0      \xB1      \x3B1      \x3B2      \x3B5      \x3C1 \n'])

degree plus_minus alpha beta epsilon rho

° ± α β ε ρ

Hope it helps.

[Ali Khan]

thank you!

[William Rose]

The link given by @Walter Roberson above no longer works, but this one does, as of August 2025:

http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_common_symbols.html

Here is a very long list:

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

[Walter Roberson]

@William Rose

I did not give the link; I edited the response to format the code into a code box.

[Walter Roberson]

Note that at the ttime the question was originally asked in 2011, using unicode characters would not generally work. It would have been more likely to work on MacOS or Linux, but would fail most of the time on Windows.

Answer 3

[Slerotin]

You can use "char(XXX)" with the XXX being the number for the character, such as char(951) for eta.

Answer 4

[Paulo Silva]

Unfortunatly it's not possible

[Bachtiar Muhammad Lubis]

so it only works in plot ?

Answer 5

[Richard Muchiri]

Try using the html with %s to detect.

charlambda=char(955);

lambda_string=(num2str(charlambda));

amp = sprintf('Enter the amplitude,%s ',lambda_string);

[Walter Roberson]

amp = sprintf('Enter the amplitude,%c ', 955);

[Richard Muchiri]

Thanks. Really short and efficient