Hi,

I'm a new user of Matlab, so I guess this one should be pretty easy.

I have a dated time-series (yyyy-mm-dd) and I want to convert the
dates to Matlab serial dates.

time =3D datenum(dates,'yyyy-mm-dd')

This doesn't seem to work, and I get different errors when I try to
tweak the command and inputs.

First, the dates are in a cell array (icon with { } brackets), and it
seems Matlab prefers it in string (char) format, but I'm not too sure
about this.

I have no problem getting a single date, using datenum(dates{1}) but
when I try to more than one date it tells me Index exceeds matrix
dimensions.

The array is 10183x1, so shouldn't the proper input be datenum(dates{:,
1}) [this means, get the entire column 1, right?)

I want the results to end up in the 'time' vector, and I've tried
different things to solve to matrix dimension issue: 1. creating an
empty 10183x1 vector, 2. creating a completely empty 'time' vector,
and 3. defining it when running the datenum command, as in row 3 of
this post. Nothing works.

If the issue lies in that my dates are in a cell array rather than in
a char, I'm having problems here to since I cannot find a way that
simply lets me convert the array to char.

Any help is very welcolme!

/ Bj=F6rn

bjornnak <bjorn.r.jonsson@gmail.com> wrote in message <8134dbc3-b6b9-4e95-b327-3e02332ab7de@k29g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>...
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a new user of Matlab, so I guess this one should be pretty easy.
> 
> I have a dated time-series (yyyy-mm-dd) and I want to convert the
> dates to Matlab serial dates.
> 
> time = datenum(dates,'yyyy-mm-dd')
> 
> This doesn't seem to work, and I get different errors when I try to
> tweak the command and inputs.
> 
> First, the dates are in a cell array (icon with { } brackets), and it
> seems Matlab prefers it in string (char) format, but I'm not too sure
> about this.
> 
> I have no problem getting a single date, using datenum(dates{1}) but
> when I try to more than one date it tells me Index exceeds matrix
> dimensions.
> 
> The array is 10183x1, so shouldn't the proper input be datenum(dates{:,
> 1}) [this means, get the entire column 1, right?)
> 
> I want the results to end up in the 'time' vector, and I've tried
> different things to solve to matrix dimension issue: 1. creating an
> empty 10183x1 vector, 2. creating a completely empty 'time' vector,
> and 3. defining it when running the datenum command, as in row 3 of
> this post. Nothing works.
> 
> If the issue lies in that my dates are in a cell array rather than in
> a char, I'm having problems here to since I cannot find a way that
> simply lets me convert the array to char.
> 
> Any help is very welcolme!
> 
> / Björn

one of the solutions

     d={     % <- a CELL of CHAR strings...
          '2000-01-01'
          '2001-02-02'
          '2010-12-31'
     };
     dt=datenum(d,'yyyy-mm-dd')
%{
%    dt =
     730486
     730884
     734503
%}
% check
     datestr(dt)
%{
     01-Jan-2000
     02-Feb-2001
     31-Dec-2010
%}

us