String to Datenum Format using opts and Setvaropts

I have read in a table using readtable() and am trying to convert on of the columns to datetime as it is currently a string in the format of the data.

My datetime format looks like...

20200721T145002Z

in which the format looks like yyyyMMdd'T'HHmmss'Z'

when i try to use

opts = setvaropts(opts, 'time','DatetimeFormat', 'yyyyMMdd HHmmss ');

or any combination with the T and Z markers it kicks back an error.

Im not an expert with how i need to format this so any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

Try reading those in as strings, then doing the conversion later:

t = repmat('20200721T145002Z', 5, 1);                                                   % Create Data
T1 = table(compose('%s',t));                                                            % Create Table
T1.Var1 = datetime(T1{:,1}, 'InputFormat','uuuuMMdd''T''HHmmssZ','TimeZone','UTC')      % Convert To Datetime

Alternatively, you can try it with setvaropts, using the 'InputFormat' string I use here. If that does not work, read it in as a string and then do the converstion.