How to account for the day suffix when using datetime to recognise dates in matlab?

I have a cell array T containing a column of dates from several events, formatted as follows:

17×1 cell array

{'Mon 14th Oct 2019 8:23:48 am' }

{'Thu 10th Oct 2019 8:00:26 am' }

...

{'Tue 3rd Sep 2019 9:03:53 am' }

{'Thu 22nd Aug 2019 6:00:29 am' }

I would like to use datetime to recognize the dates in each cell, however the date contains the suffix for the day of the month ("14th", "10th", etc.), and I couldn't find an option in the input format to account for day suffixes.

If I (manually) remove the suffixes from the days, the following works fine:

datetime(T{1,1},'InputFormat','eeee dd MMMM yyyy hh:mm:ss a')

ans =

datetime

14-Oct-2019 08:23:48

Is there a way to account for the day suffixes (or to automatically remove them before using datetime)?

Thanks

Pedro Viana

Answer 1

[Peter Perkins]

Pedro, you could put a literal th in the format,

'eeee dd ''th''MMMM yyyy hh:mm:ss a'

and read most of them, and go back and read all the places where you got a NaT, using a literal nd in the format, then again with a literal st. But honestly, the simplest thing is to use replace or strrep to pre-process the text.

Just out of curiosity, where did these timestamps come from?

[Pedro Viana]

Thank you for your help. I ended up writing a looped script to remove the 2-letter suffix after the first number that appears on the string (independently of whether it's "th", "st", "nd", "rd").

for i = 1: size(T,1)
B = regexp(T{i,1},'\d*','Match'); % extract numbers in the string
U = char(T{i,1}); % change to char format
% concatenate the string from beginning up to number, then from space until
% the end
T{i,1}{:} = [U(1:4+size(B{1}{1},2)) U(5+size(B{1}{1},2)+2:end)];
end

These are entries from an eDiary app.

Thank you

Answer 2

[Jyotsna Talluri]

If dates are in a particular format given by you,suffixes {"th","nd","st","rd"} can be removed by

 erase(T,["th","nd","st","rd"]);

There can be other ways to do this also