How do I get matlab to read a string of dates and times

I have as a part of an xls file a column that has data written as 'dd/mm/yy HH:MM:SS' I need to be able to split this into 6 columns for day, month, year, hour, minute and second. I can't seem to make it work. Any ideas?

Answer 1

[Peter Perkins]

In recent versions of MATLAB, readtable will read dates/times from a spreadsheet automatically, assuming that the aspreadsheet is formatted sensibly. In other cases, you may get text timestamps, which you can convert to datetimes, or excel date numbers, which you can also convert to datetimes using 'ConvertFrom','excel' (I think that's what dpb was referring to.

If you really need to, you can then convert to a six-column numeric matrix using datevec, but you should consider whether you really need to do that once you have the timestamps as datetimes. It is very often not necessary.

[Shachar Givon]

thanks!

Answer 2

[dpb]

readtable will import Excel dates as datetime values which you can then convert from Excel encoding to Matlab with the 'dateType','Excel' input argument name-value pair. If needed can set the format for the time string in the import options object that can be passed as described in the examples for readtable for spreadsheets.

[Shachar Givon]

great thanks