When you run the following line of code, the variable blMLEC contains a double value.
Low = [blMLEC, '-','-'];
By this table in the documentation, when you combine a double and a char vector in one array, the result is a char array.
What is char(1.5945)? It's not the vector '1.5945' (the string class has that behavior and would return the string "1.5945", but the char class does not.) It's a control character.
If you want to combine text data and numeric data into one text data with the textual representation of the number, use the string class or use num2str.
>> 1.5945 + "-" + "-"
ans =
"1.5945--"
>> [num2str(1.5945), '-' ,'-']
ans =
'1.5945--'
>> [1.5945 "-" "-"]
ans =
1×3 string array
"1.5945" "-" "-"
But looking at your use case, you probably don't want to convert the number into text data. Instead, fill the elements of your Low vector where you don't have data with missing or NaN.
>> Low = [1.5945 missing missing]
Low =
1.5945 NaN NaN
>> Low = [1.5945 NaN NaN]
Low =
1.5945 NaN NaN
Now when you want to process your data, there are functions specifically defined for working with missing data or that can "do the right thing" when working on a set of data that contains missing data.
>> min(Low, [], 'omitnan')
