Strange behaviour when writing RTF file - matlab

Question

I have a strange behaviour in Matlab dealing with RTF files.
The rtf file is read with this instruction:
cin = textread(filename, '%s', 'delimiter', '\n');
(cin) is a Nx1 cell where N is the number of rows of the file,
so I can edit some specific row.
I write the file RTF with the function below:
function dum= cell2rtf(cin, filename)
[row, col]= size(cin);
fout= fopen(filename, 'w');
for ii=1:row
if(ii<row)
fprintf(fout, '%s\r\n', cin{ii});
else
fprintf(fout, '%s', cin{ii});
end
end
fclose(fout);
The strange behaviour is this one:
If the row cin{x} is a string with content
'19°\cell 19°\cell \cell \cell \cell 70°'
the same row appears like below when the file is written by the function
'19°\cell 19°\cell \cell \cell \cell 70°'
I can't understand why the char '°' becomes '°' in every occurrence
and I'd like to know how this can be corrected.

Answer 1

The problem is that textread() works on plain text files, and RTF files are not plain text files: they are binary-ish files that contain markup and formatting codes, sorta like Word .doc files. textread() is probably encountering those formatting/structural codes and misinterpreting them as plain text characters, and that's where your junk characters like  are coming from.
Could you just save your RTF file as a plain text file and read from that?
Otherwise, you'll need to write an RTF parser or find an RTF parsing library and use that. Matlab works (kind of) easily with Java libraries, so you could use the Apache Tika library's RTFParser or RTFParserKit.