Creating dates tables with loop

I am trying to build a matrix that contains dates separated by a time step. It woks well for the first two lines, but then it is missing a second. This is the answer i get

['16.04.2014 00:00:00'
'16.04.2014 01:00:00'
'16.04.2014 01:59:59'
'16.04.2014 02:59:59'
'16.04.2014 03:59:59'
'16.04.2014 04:59:59'
...]

It is happening only when I defined the time step as 1. Does anyone knos how can I make it work correctly?

dates(1,1)=datenum('16.04.2014 00:00:00', 'dd.mm.yyyy HH:MM:SS'); 
df=datenum('07.06.2016 23:59:59', 'dd.mm.yyyy HH:MM:SS'); %Final date
ddate=1; %specify time step in hours
for i=2:(df-dates(1))*24/ddate+1
  dates(i,1)=dates(i-1,1)+(ddate/24);
end
%dates(end,2)=df;
dates=datetime(dates,'ConvertFrom','datenum', 'Format', 'dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss');    

[dpb]

for i=2:(df-dates(1))*24/ddate+1
  dates(i,1)=dates(i-1,1)+(ddate/24);
end

You're introduced floating point rounding error by the division in a couble and the loop. "Don't do that!"

Also you're using the deprecated datenum to generate datetime -- don't do that, either! Just use datetime from the git-go...

But, your biggest problem is that you have shortened the time span by that second you lost by setting start at 00:00:00 of one day but ending at 23:59:59 of another day but making that time difference the differential instead of incrementing by an even hour.

You can't have 23:59:59 as your end value unless you have a 59 minute, 59 second hour at the end instead of a full hour or your average day is short by the one second spread over the number of hours from beginning to end.

[Juan Manuel Romero]

Thank you very much for your answer.

I don't have much experience in programming, how can then I avoid the floating point rounding error?

Also, if a need the dates as numbers in order to be able to add hours, how could I avoid using datenum?

I worked it that way because I need to get exactly the last moment of that day as the last data point in the matrix and havind the next day at 00:00:00 would add a new row that I dn't really need.

Answer 1

[Andrei Bobrov]

dates = (datetime(2014,4,16,0,0,0):hours(1):datetime(2016,6,8,0,0,0))';

[Juan Manuel Romero]

Works very well, thank you very much for the answer!