Converting Given times to a Vector

I have a series of 4158 time points that i must convert from the hh:mm:ss.ss format to something i can use in matlab. this set of data is contained in cells in excel.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

Without having your file it’s difficult to write specific code. However:

time_cell = {'12:34:56.01'; '12:34:57.50'};                 % Create Data
dn = datenum(time_cell, 'HH:MM:SS.FFF');                    % Convert To Date Numbers
Check = datevec(dn)                                         % Check Conversion (Delete)

will work if I made the correct assumptions about it.

[marco hosfeld]

00:00:21.80; 00:00:22.16; 00:00:22.52; 00:00:22.88; 00:00:23.24;

this would be a sample of the data. It comes as a single column of times. it is not bounded by ' '. thank you so much for answering this.

[Star Strider]

My pleasure.

You said your times were a cell array of strings, that is likely correct if you used the xlsread function to import your data. They don’t have to look exactly the same as the cell array I used to test my code.

Did you test your data with my code example?

Did it work?

If not, what was the error?

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

Rather than using serial date numbers as Star Strider suggested, if you're using a release where it is available (release R2014b or later) I recommend using datetime with the 'InputFormat' option to specify the format of the dates in the cellstr.

time_cell = {'12:34:56.01'; '12:34:57.50'};
timeFormat = 'hh:mm:ss.SS';
dateVector = datetime(time_cell, 'InputFormat', timeFormat);
dateVector.Format = timeFormat

The last line changes the format used to display the date vector to match the format as it was imported so that the display of the dateVector should match exactly what you see in time_cell.