Why char is stored as 2 bytes in Matlab S-Function

[poster]

I would like to pass an uint8 array to my S-Function as a parameter:

inParam = char(uint8(1:7))

In the S-Function I did the followings

UINT8_T *inParam = (UINT8_T *)mxGetPr(ssGetSFcnParam(S, PARAM_IN_PORT_NR)); //;

but I saw that actually the array elements are stored as 2 bytes.

UINT16_T *inPorts = (UINT16_T *)mxGetPr(ssGetSFcnParam(S, PARAM_IN_PORT_NR)); //

// I can loop through the data

// This is only a snippet

*(inPorts++);

Why is that? Is this happening in all the Matlab versions?

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