Get tenor between two time points

In excel, if some cells are in the format of date, then the difference of the cells gives you the tenor. How can I do that in Matlab?

To be specific I mean I already have some serial data number, say 20110610 and 20110716 (today's date and the expiration date of the contract), and I wanna get the number of days between these two dates. So in this example I'd like to get 36.

If I do: 20110716-20110610, the ans is 106, the same as

datenum(20110716)-datenum(20110610)=106

So my question is, again, how can I get 36 out of these two dates?

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

[Andrew Newell]

d1 = datenum('20110610','yyyymmdd');
d2 = datenum('20110716','yyyymmdd');
d2-d1

[Zoe]

Here it is, thx :)

[Zoe]

And actually d2 is a vector of maturity dates for me and d1 is only one entry (today's date). Is there any way to implement the same thing without using loop? ( Do you think there is a way to convert a vector using datenum as you did but without any loop?)

[Fangjun Jiang]

It works. What is your original data format?

datenum({'20110711','20110712'},'yyyymmdd')

[Zoe]

%f

It is a vector of numerical numbers which was imported from .txt file.

[Andrew Newell]

You can use

d1 = floor(now);

[Zoe]

Another question bothering me is:

d1 = datenum('20110609','yyyymmdd');

d1 =

734663

D = 20110609;

d2 = datenum('D','yyyymmdd')

d2 =

734504

Do you know why? Thx!!!

[Andrew Newell]

'D' is not the string version of the number:

>> D = 20110609;

>> D

D =

20110609

>> 'D'

ans =

D

Use d2 = datenum(num2str(D),'yyyymmdd') instead.

[Fangjun Jiang]

You need to learn a little bit about the data type of Matlab.

In "D=20110609", D is the variable name, its value is 20110609. In "d2=datenum('D','yyyymmdd'), D is the capital letter D. What you really need is datenum(num2str(D),'yyyymmdd').

To make it work for vector,

a=[20110711 20110712 20110712];

datenum(arrayfun(@num2str,a,'un',0),'yyyymmdd')