I have to generate one date (string or number) from two strings, the first of which is the day and the second the time. I must have made an error something in my code, because the result is different from the concatenation of the source data.
DIR4{h} = datestr(strcat(DIR1{h},' ',DIR2{h}),'dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM:SS');
but:
DIR1{1} = 26/06/1998
DIR2{1} = 15:00:00
DIR4{1} = 17/03/0049 15:00:00
What's happened?
If you'd executed every intermediate steps, you would have seen that strcat ignores trailing spaces (as documented):
strcat('26/06/1998',' ','15:00:00')
> 26/06/199815:00:00
The fix is rather easy: just don't use strcat, but rather use plain matrix concatenation:
strSrcDate = ['26/06/1998',' ','15:00:00']
Next you're using the wrong date conversion function. datestr is to convert tó a string, not from. Ok ok, it can handle string input, but that's quite restricted. You'll want to use datenum:
This gives a date serial (read the doc!), which is a number that represents a date (without any ambiguity). Use that number for internal storage of a date, and when you want to print that date out to screen or file, convert it to a string using datestr:
numSrcDate = datenum(strSrcDate,'dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM:SS')
> 729932.625
datestr(numSrcDate,'dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM:SS'); % or any other format
datestr(numSrcDate,'dd/mm/yy HH:MM');
> 26/06/1998 15:00:00
> 26/06/98 15:00
The input to datestr must be a vector.
date(1,:)=[1998 6 26 15 0 0];
Sdate{1}=datestr(date,'dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM:SS');
Sdate =
26/06/1998 15:00:00
