Write a program that accepts an input string from the user and determines how many times a user-specified character appears within the string. (Hint - Look up the 's' option of the input function using the MATLAB Help Browser.)

First, you need to prompt the user to enter the input string and the character that needs to be searched. You can do this using the 'input' function. Here's how: ```matlab inputString = input('Please enter a string: ', 's'); searchCharacter = input('Please enter the character you want to search for: ', 's'); ``` Note that we're using the 's' option here, which denotes that we're capturing input as a string.

Now, you need to iterate through the input string and count how many times the specified character appears. You can do this using a for loop and a count variable to keep track of the number of occurrences. Here's the code to do so: ```matlab count = 0; for i = 1:length(inputString) if inputString(i) == searchCharacter count = count + 1; end end ```

Finally, you need to display the result to the user, i.e., the number of occurrences of the specified character within the string. You can use the 'fprintf' function to do this. Here's the code to display the result: ```matlab fprintf('The character %s appears %d times within the string.\n', searchCharacter, count); ``` Here's the full program in one piece: ```matlab % Get the input string and character inputString = input('Please enter a string: ', 's'); searchCharacter = input('Please enter the character you want to search for: ', 's'); % Count the occurrences count = 0; for i = 1:length(inputString) if inputString(i) == searchCharacter count = count + 1; end end % Display the result fprintf('The character %s appears %d times within the string.\n', searchCharacter, count); ``` You can now run this code in MATLAB and test it with different input strings and characters.