double(<character>) gives different result in MATLAB and Octave

Question

MATLAB (documentation):

>> double('α')    
ans =    
   945

Octave 4.0.0, Ubuntu 16.04 (documentation):

>> double('α')
ans =    
   206   177

Why do I get different results?

_{Note: 'α' is a greek lowercase alpha.}

Answer 1

This is because the default encoding in MATLAB is 'US-ASCII' (can be different depending on Locale settings) while in Octave, it is 'UTF-8'.

To confirm, here is the result from MATLAB:

>> unicode2native('α', 'UTF-8')

ans =

  1×2 uint8 row vector

   206   177

You can check your encoding with feature or slCharacterEncoding() :

feature('DefaultCharacterSet')

or

slCharacterEncoding() 

---

According to Mathworks, you can change your encoding with:

slCharacterEncoding(encoding)

I didn't have much luck in changing the encoding and getting the same results afterwards. It could be a bug.