Converting text to dates with datenum. A problem concerning milliseconds.

Hi!

I'm trying to convert a large cell of text (containing about 13 million rows) with date information into a date or numbers format.

The text looks like this

'20160405 16:00:00:106'

I'm trying

% datetime(T,'InputFormat','yyyyMMdd HH:mm:ss:SSS')

but it keeps cutting the milliseconds.

05-Apr-2016 16:00:00

I've done some googling and searched here but I couldn't come up with a solution yet. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

Build the datetime.

T = '20160405 16:00:00:106'
fmt = 'yyyyMMdd HH:mm:ss:SSS';
dt = datetime(T, 'InputFormat', fmt)

What display format is dt using?

dt.Format

Make it use the same format as T was in.

dt.Format = fmt

[Ben]

Yep. This is it. Thanks! Simple stuff :)

[Steven Lord]

If you wanted to do this all in one line, you could set the Format in the same command in which you created the datetime.

dt = datetime(T, 'InputFormat', fmt, 'Format', fmt)