Extracting time from a string

Hi could i extract the time from this line, which is saved as a text

90 83 3010 Kobe Soto Lewisville 18:19.9 5:52/M 9

the desired extraction is : 18:19.9,

now this will have to repeat for other 300 similar lines like the one above.

[Walter Roberson]

What is known to be consistent? Will it always be in the 7th field? Will it always be in the 3rd last field? Is it guaranteed that there will be a decimal point in the time? Will the time have leading 0 for before 12:00 ?

Answer 1

[Cris LaPierre]

I think I found the source of your data. Does that sound right?

I used to be very involved in XC and track and field, so of course I had to help you out. Here you go:

% Scrape the data from the webpage
url = 'https://tx.milesplit.com/meets/242182/results/474095/raw#.Xs8w-8ApCMo';
code = webread(url);
str = extractHTMLText(code);

% Read in and format the data
varNames = ["Place" "AdjPlace" "Bib No" "Name" "Team" "Time" "Pace" "YR"];
data = textscan(str(6:end),'%f %q %f %q %C %{mm:ss.S}T %{mm:ss}T %*q %f',...
    'Delimiter',{'\t','/'},...
    "EndOfLine",'\n',...
    "HeaderLines",5,...
    "TextType",'string');

% Place the results in a table
results = cell2table(data);
results = varfun(@(x) x{:},results);
results.Properties.VariableNames = varNames

If you are new to tables, take a minute to go through this doc page. You can also see an introduction to accessing data in a table in this video from the Exploratory Data Analysis with MATLAB course on Coursera.

In short, you use dot notation to indicate which table variable to use. For example

results.Time(90)

ans = 
   18:19.9

If you want the entire row, use the (row, column) syntax instead:

   results(90,:)

   ans = 
    Place    AdjPlace    Bib No       Name           Team        Time      Pace     YR
    _____    ________    ______    ___________    __________    _______    _____    __

     90        "83"       3010     "Kobe Soto"    Lewisville    18:19.9    05:52    9 

See this page for more on accesssing data in a table.