bug in char, str2mat and strvcat behaviour?

[Thorsten Meyer]

Hi,

with octave built from the current mercurial tip, I get:

octave:52> str2mat("a", "b", "", "c")
ans =

a
b

c

octave:53> char("a", "b", "", "c")
ans =

a
b
c

octave:54> strvcat("a", "b", "", "c")
ans =

a
b
c


So str2mat will generate an empty line for an empty string, while char and strvcat eliminate the
empty string.

However, the matlab documentation says:
[...]
S = str2mat(T1, T2, T3, ...) forms the matrix S containing the text strings T1, T2, T3, ... as rows.
The function automatically pads each string with blanks in order to form a valid matrix. Each text
parameter, Ti, can itself be a string matrix. This allows the creation of arbitrarily large string
matrices. Empty strings are significant.

      Note   This routine will become obsolete in a future version. Use char instead.

Remarks

str2mat differs from strvcat in that empty strings produce blank rows in the output. In strvcat,
empty strings are ignored.
[...]

So apparently, char is supposed to behave like str2mat in this respect and the above is a bug in the
char() function. Could someone with access to matlab please try, what really happens for the above
examples?

regards

Thorsten