unexpected use of 00:00:01 in a scalar context matlab

if abs(Int12{i,6}- F1{j,1}) <= '00:00:01' why is it not corret?

[Daniel Pollard]

Can you give some more context? Since we don't know what Int12 or F1 are, it's not easy to help. What are you trying to do?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

In MATLAB '00:00:01' is a character vector. When you use a character vector in a numeric expression, most of the time the character vector will have each character converted to the Unicode position number used to encode the character.

 double('00:00:01')

ans = 1×8

48 48 58 48 48 58 48 49

You would then be comparing whatever is on the left side of the < to that vector of numbers, getting out a vector of logical results.

If the values you are working with just happen to be datetime objects then subtracting would give a duration object. You can then compare

  if abs(Int12{i,6}- F1{j,1}) <= duration('00:00:01')

or more compactly

 if abs(Int12{i,6}- F1{j,1}) <= seconds(1)

[Andrea Sbaragli]

Thanks!!