Why does char give me an empty output?

>> b=[1,2,3,4,5]

b =

     1     2     3     4     5

>> char(b)

ans =

this is what I enter and the output is five little empty boxes. I've tried this with several numeric vectors and matrices and it does the same thing with varying numbers of boxes. It also does this if I manually input the vector. The char command will only display strings for me right now. It was working previously, and then it wasn't I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong