String to serial date number

Hey I have a textfile: The first coloumn represents year/month and rest of the coloumns are deviations.

I want to convert the first coloumn to a serial date num. Meaning total days from 0.january, 0000. With the function datenum.

What I have tried is to first import the txt file, lets call it get.txt

f = importdata("get.txt");

Then assign the first coloumn to variable fdate.

fdate = f.textdata;

Then Ive tried to use the datenum function

x = datenum(fdate, "yyyy-mm")

The error I get is:

Error using dtstr2dtnummx

Failed to convert from text to date number.

[Guillaume]

I want to convert the first coloumn to a serial date num

Why? Unless you're using a very old version of matlab, using datetime would make a lot more sense.

Attaching an example text file instead of a screenshot (which we can't use for testing) is a lot more useful.

Indicating which version of matlab you use would be useful as well. There's a field to the right of question where you can enter the product (matlab) and the version.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

datenum(fdate, "yyyy-mm")
%                   ^ this character does not match your date data!

[Olaf]

Oh thanks so much. How can I then show total days from 0 january, 0000 for each row?

[Guillaume]

If you use datetime as I commented, dead easy:

days(yourdatetimearray - datetime(0, 0, 0))