Convert serial number dates to month and year

I have a date (736473) that i want to convert to month and year. How do i go about doing that ?

Answer 1

[Paolo]

 mydate = datetime(736473,'ConvertFrom','datenum','Format','yyyy-MM')

[Keturah Palma]

and if i have a huge list of dates. would i still use this?

[Paolo]

It would still work, yes. If you want the end result to be a datetime, use my solution. If you would like the end result to be a double, use Walter's solution below.

[Walter Roberson]

In the above code, the call to datenum() is not needed: the value such as 736473 is already a serial date number.

You can pass a vector or array of values in the var variable in the above code.

Note that the result of the above will be a series of datetime objects, not character vectors. If you wanted the text as the result, you could cellstr(mydate)

[Keturah Palma]

thank you so much

[Paolo]

That's very true Walter, datenum is indeed redundant. I should probably get some sleep... I'll edit.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

dv = datevec(736473);
year = dv(:,1);
month = dv(:,2);

[Walter Roberson]

If you want the result as a cell array of character vectors, then you can use

datestr(736473:736475,'yyyy-mm')

for example.

Note that for datestr(), the coding for month is lower-case m, but that for the newer datetime(), the coding for month is upper-case M.