Chinese characters in html not recognized

Hi there! I need to read and parse some Chinese characters in some html files and save later into an excel worksheet.

An examplary url of such html is: http://123.127.164.29:18082/CVT/Jsp/zjgl/nerds/201903.html

Currently the main issue is that after reading the html file into character vector using urlread/webread, all the Chinese characters are displayed as weird symbols. Also in the following steps, it will be attempted to use strfind to find the index of Chinese characters in the complete character vector, but the Chinese characters to be searched for are displayed as ? in the m-file.

Untill now I have already tried out 2 methods to set the character encoding of MATLAB:

1. slCharacterEncoding('GBK') (since the source html adopts GBK character encoding)
2. edit the lcdata.xml file on MATLAB path

Neither of these two methods worked, nor did changing the MATLAB preference font/the regional setting. I have basically exhausted all possibilities that I can think of and have foud on the web.

I would appreciate it if someone could help me out with a viable solution. Thanks in advance!

Bohan

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

S = webread(url);
proper_S = native2unicode( uint8(S), 'GPK');

Answer 2

[Patrik Forssén]

opt = weboptions('CharacterEncoding', 'GBK');
str = webread(url, opt);