Merge datetime cells to create specific datetime format

Hi,

I used textscan to import an .txt file.

file = textscan(fileID,'%{yyyy}D %{MM}D %{dd}D %{HH}D %{mm}D %f %f %f %f','Delimiter',',', 'headerLines', 1)

Now I have 9 different cells. Cell 1 contains yyyy (2018), cell 2 contains MM (05) and Cell 3 DD (22).

However I want to merge YMD to one cell with the %{ddMMyy}D format. How can I do that? Output format should then be: 22052018

Thank you in Advance,

Renan

Answer 1

[Renan Deuter]

Hello,

so I found the solution by myself and will share it to later users having an similar issue:

The way to go is formatting the data from datetime -> string then merge it and then back to datetime again.

Useful functions are datestr and strcat

In my case this can be done by:

% create grabber_date 
                    % loading the variables into length x 1 datetimes
                    year = grabber_file{1,1};
                    month = grabber_file{1,2};
                    day = grabber_file{1,3};
                    
                    % convert to string
                    y = datestr(year, 'yy'); 
                    m = datestr(month, 'mm');
                    d = datestr(day, 'dd');

                    % merge using strcat
                    datestring = strcat(d, m, y);
                    % transform back to datetime
                    grabber_date = datetime(datestring,'InputFormat','ddMMyy', 'Format','ddMMyy');
                    
                    

The Output format can be varied by changing 'Format'.

You can also convert integers/doubles to datetime by using this tunnel. Just use num2str instead of datestr.

Best Regards,

Renan

Answer 2

[Jeremy Hughes]

If your data looks like:

2021,02,22,02,30,...

then you might be better off calling readmatrix, and converting the columns

A = readmatrix(file)
T = datetime([A(:,1:5),zeros(height(A),1)])