convert dec to char

[Victor Hanby]

I want to permutate a character string. This works in matlab:

str=‘abc’;
perms(str);

but not in Octave, which seems to expect a decimal argument. I guess the matlab 
version of perms is overloaded? To get this to run in Octave, I can use 
toascii(str) and then permutate the resulting vector, but I can’t figure out 
how to  convert this back to a string. There doesn’t seem to be an inverse of 
‘toascii’?

Vic