How Can I avoid a loop for in a table?

Hi everyone,

I have a table called 'export' with more than 2000000 rows. One of its column, called ' Expiration', is a dates vector. I woul like to avoid the loop for in this code:

for i = 1:size(export,1)
    if weekday(export.Expiration(i,1))==7 
       export.Expiration(i,1) = cellstr(datetime(datenum(export.Expiration(i,1))-1,'ConvertFrom','datenum','Format','MM/dd/yyyy'));
    end 
end

Can somebody help me? Many thanks.

[John BG]

can you make available a few lines of your table so readers can work on the sample directly?

[Shadi Mahdiani]

If you can provide a few rows of your table, it would be easier to find out what you are exactly looking for. But generally find and strncmp help when you struggle with big tables and want to avoid for loops.

[Guillaume]

Indeed an example would have made things clearer, however the format can be inferred from the given code. export.Expiration is a column of date strings in the form 'MM/dd/yyyy'

The purpose of the loop is to change the date to the day before when it is the last day of the week.

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

An example of the data and an explanation of what you want to achieve would indeed have been useful. From your code, it would appear that the dates are stored as date strings and that if the date is the last day of the week, you want to make it the day before.

That is trivial to achieve. The exact equivalent of your code without a loop is simply:

wday = weekday(export.Expiration);
export.Expiration(wday == 7) = cellstr(datetime(datenum(export.Expiration(wday == 7) - 1, 'ConvertFrom', 'datenum', 'Format', 'MM/dd/yyyy'));

However, I would recommend that you actually store your date as datetime, which would make the date manipulation much easier and avoid this triple conversion to date number -> datetime -> date string:

 export.Expiration = datetime(export.Expiration, 'InputFormat', 'MM/dd/yyyy', 'Format', 'MM/dd/yyyy');
 islastday = day(export.Expiration, 'dayofweek') == 7;
 export.Expiration(islastday) = export.Expiration(islastday) - 1;

I assume you're aware that in matlab, the last day of the week is Saturday. Otherwise you'll have to change the 7 to 1, if you meant to find the Sundays.

[Peter Perkins]

One small tweak:

export.Expiration(islastday) = export.Expiration(islastday) - caldays(1);

With no time zone, it won't matter, but it is more readable, and it will continue work correctly if time zones are added and the day happens to fall on a Daylight Saving shift.

Another possibility would be

export.Expiration(islastday) = dateshift(export.Expiration(islastday),'dayofweek','saturday','previous');

Answer 2

[KSSV]

You can convert your table into cell using table2cell and access complete row/column you want.

[Guillaume]

You can access complete rows/columns of a table directly with indexing or dot notation, there's no need to waste time converting them to anything.

[KSSV]

That's true....but if any head lines of the table present, they do come along with row/ column. Isn't it?