datenum input string format

I have dates created by another software which have a different formats than recognized by MATLAB. These days are like this:

'2012-06-01T03:15:00Z'

I want to feed these dates to datenum() and extract the date and time, but datenum doesn't support this format. Is there any way to define a custom time format in matlab? or any other suggestion please

Bests

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Are T and Z always in this format?

[hasan]

yes, the format is the same all the time, just the numbers change.

Answer 1

[Jan]

You can try to use FEX: DateStr2Num. This is 50 to 100 times faster than the powerful datenum command.

Although the format does not exactly match the style 31: "yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS", the space and the last character is ignored at all. So try:

Dnum = DateStr2Num('2012-06-01T03:15:00Z', 31);

A cell string can be used as input directly also.

An alternative dull but fast Matlab code:

S = '2012-06-01T03:15:00Z';
x = S - '0';
D = datenummx( ...
          x(1)*1000 + x(2)*100 + x(3)*10 + x(4), ... % Year
          x(6)*10 + x(7), ...  % Month
          x(9)*10 + x(10), ... % Day
          x(12)*10 + x(13), x(15)*10 + x(16), x(18)*10 + x(19));

As long as the input is well formatted, this works nice. But Matlab's datenum is smarter and considers e.g. overflows etc.

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

d='2012-06-01T03:15:00Z'
a=regexp(d,'[^T Z]+','match')
b=datestr(datenum(horzcat(a{:}),'yyyy-mm-ddHH:MM:SS'))

% or

d='2012-06-01T03:15:00Z'
a=regexprep(d,'[T Z]+',' ')

Answer 3

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

d='2012-06-01T03:15:00Z'
out=datestr(datenum(d,'YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS'),'YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS')

Answer 4

[Andrei Bobrov]

q = '2012-06-01T03:15:00Z'
out = datenum(str2double(regexp(q,'\d*','match')));