I cannot save matlab editor, the .m file.

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Yuge Zhang
Yuge Zhang on 9 Aug 2021
Commented: Walter Roberson on 11 Mar 2025
Hi,
When I save the .m file, it warning that " The matlab editor cannot use US-ASCII encoding to save the file, please use UTF-8 encoding to save the file ". Am I missing some kind of file? What do I need to do? The computer I use is MAC, the matlab version is R0221a.
Look forward to your reply!

Answers (4)

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 12 Aug 2021
Use Save As to save the file. The saving box that comes up will have a menu that allows you to select the format of the file to save as. Make sure that UTF8 is selected, not ISO-8896-1 and not "all .m files"

Constantino Carlos Reyes-Aldasoro
I guess that you must have used some special characters like accents, have you copy-pasted something into the editor?
  2 Comments
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 10 Aug 2021
Right, you can get this message if your file includes any character whose Unicode code is outside the range 0 to 255.
Yuge Zhang
Yuge Zhang on 12 Aug 2021
I can’t use it after I clean the computer. I suspect that some files have been deleted automatically.

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DGM
DGM on 9 Aug 2021
You might want to check what your locale settings are
feature('locale')
and see if any of this is of use:
My understanding was that this should be utf8 in that version/env, but maybe yours is set to us-ascii for some reason.
This might also be of help.

shakiba
shakiba on 11 Mar 2025
why when i want to save my matlab file i have 2 options one is (utf-8) and another is (windows-1256) which one is correct option for saving my file i picked both each time and after saving a function code it showed an error
  1 Comment
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 11 Mar 2025
Save to windows-1256:
  • if you need to use an editor that only supports single-byte characters
  • if you need to read the file with a facility that only supports single-byte characters
  • if you need to use the file with a sufficiently old version of MATLAB that did not support utf-8
Otherwise... you might as well save as utf-8. utf-8 is accepted by all modern editors and all modern methods of reading files. utf-8 is portable to other operating systems, where-as windows-1256 is not portable to other operating systems.

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