String convertion to date

Hello. I have the following strings

a= '16deNoviembredel2017'

b= '20:56:14'

I would like to convert the string into a specific date time format as indicated below

dt_event= datetime([a,b],'InputFormat','ddMMMMyyyyHH:mm:ss', 'Format','yyyy_MM_dd HH_mm_ss');

Could you please help me to correct the inputFormat to make it readable. Thank you.

Jorge

[Jan]

"deNoviembredel" is a hard problem. Is there no chance to get a more standardized input format?

[Jorge Luis Paredes Estacio]

Hello, the information is taken in that way as a string from different files

[Jan]

Then my question is: Can you ask the authors of these files to use a less obscure date format? Text files are wanted to be processable by code, so why deciding for a format which is hard to parse?

But I know: In many cases it is impossible to modifiy the inputs and the programmers have to live with strange data.

[Jorge Luis Paredes Estacio]

Unfortunately, you can find that information like that from acceleration records and need to modify the scripts to verify the date before processing them.

Answer 1

[Jan]

a = '16deNoviembredel2017';
b = '20:56:14';
dt_event = datetime([a,b], 'Locale', 'es_ES', ...
    'InputFormat', 'dd''de''MMMM''del''yyyyHH:mm:ss', ...
    'Format','yyyy_MM_dd HH_mm_ss')

dt_event = datetime
   2017_11_16 20_56_14

This works for this specific input, but are the keys "de" and "del" really fixed? I do not speak Spanish.

[Jorge Luis Paredes Estacio]

Thank you very much. It works perfectly.

Best

Jorge

Answer 2

[Benjamin Kraus]

Note, I don't speak Spanish, so I'm not sure of the proper user of "de" and "del", so this answer may need to be adjusted.

I suspect you are going to need to manually remove "de" and "del" before you can use datetime. For example:

a = '16deNoviembredel2017';
b = '20:56:14';
a_ = regexprep(a,'(\d{2})de(\w+)del(\d{4})','$1$2$3')

a_ = '16Noviembre2017'

dt_event= datetime([a_,b],'InputFormat','ddMMMMyyyyHH:mm:ss', ...
    'Format','yyyy_MM_dd HH_mm_ss','Locale','es_ES')

dt_event = datetime
   2017_11_16 20_56_14

[Jorge Luis Paredes Estacio]

Thank you very much. It works perfectly.