Use transcode for string convert to Julia

[musm]

No description provided.

[simonster]

I'm not sure we can assume characters are always UTF-16. In R2015a+ we should probably use mxArrayToUTF8String since it is guaranteed to handle the locale properly.

[musm]

http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/local-apps/matlabhelp/techdoc/apiref/mxchar.html

Also mxarray('a') is also broken (not fixed by this)

[simonster]

Just because MATLAB is storing characters as 16-bit integers does not necessarily mean it's encoding them as UTF-16, which is what transcode assumes.

[simonster]

Although http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/apiref/mxchar.html suggests it is UTF-16 (really UCS-2) at least on new-ish MATLAB, so maybe this is okay.

[musm]

people on versions older than 2006 are out of luck, I think that's fine since it's 10 years old at this point

[simonster]

I think there are versions newer than 2006 that don't use UTF-16 internally (mxChar was introduced before 2006a, but looking around online it's clear it wasn't always defined to be Unicode), but I don't think there's a convenient way to convert their internal encodings to UTF-8, and 16-bit ISO-8859-1 is basically the same as UTF-16, so I'm fine with this.

[musm]

we might have to revert this. It's not properly handling some unicode glyphs

[twadleigh]

@musm which? It was working fine for me in mexjulia on my tests.

[musm]

@twadleigh see the test added at: #78

[twadleigh]

I can't duplicate a test failure in mexjulia.

If I throw the following into Mex.jl:

const funky_string = "λ α γ"
is_funky_string(str) = str == funky_string

and call it from MATAB, I get:

>> str = jl.eval('funky_string')

str =

λ α γ

>> jl.call('is_funky_string', str)

ans =

  logical

   1