find most frequent characters in a string

I have a string and I want to find the most frequent characters that appear in it. Is there anyway to do this with matlab?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

mode()

[Alex]

mode is only for numeric arguments. I'm working with a string

[David Young]

char(mode(double(str)))

[Walter Roberson]

David's code is fine. It could also be written more concisely as

char(mode(0+str))

Answer 2

[David Young]

One way to get the commonest n characters, in descending order of frequency:

>> str = 'hello world';
>> n = 5;  % number of characters to report
>> [~, c] = sort(hist(double(str), 0:255), 'descend');
>> f = char(c(1:n)-1)

f =

lo de

There may well be numerous better ways.