Working with Dates,Problem with syntax

I have a set of dates stored in b array as 'dd-mm-yyyy' as strings. I need to write queries to select dates of a particular month. So I tried doing this:

for i=2:8400

index=strfind(b,'01');

end;

for i=2:8400

if(index(i)==3)

disp(b(i));

end;

end;

But it says '??? Undefined function or method 'eq' for input arguments of type 'cell'.' I new to matlab so I'm sorry if I'm doing something stupid. Thanks.

Answer 1

[Amit]

Following your code trend: strfind might not work in this case as for example if you are looking for January (01) in a date string like 01-01-2013, there are 3 instances where 01 can be found. If the format dd-mm-yyyy is consistent in all your data, something like this might work:

b_tmp = b(:,[4 5]);
for i = 2:8400
   if strcmp(b_tmp(i),'01')   % Lets say you're looking for January (01)
   disp(b(i));
end
end

[Aditya]

Thanks Amit,

The solution worked.Just wanted to know how to check for a particular substring in a string,as in,finding '-01-' in '01-01-2013' using strcmp.

Regards.

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Example

s={'01-01-2013';
'11-01-2013'
'21-01-2013'
'22-03-2013'
'01-04-2013'
'21-05-2013'}
d=datevec(s,'dd-mm-yyyy');
% To search th month 01;
idx=d(:,2)==1
out=s(idx)