How to force Matlab to only plot some selected strings on the x-axis?

I have data linked to specific dates. Let's say e.g.

dates=731948:735938; n=length(dates);

which I can convert to a string of "real dates" by

dates=datestr(dates,0));

starting from 01/02/04 up to 12/5/14. Now I want to use this string as the x-axis of a plot.

plot(rand(n,1));
set(gca, 'XTick', 1:n, 'XTickLabel', dates);

The problem I have now is that there are way to many dates on the x-axis. On the resulting plot you hardly can see anything. So my question is how can I select only lets say every 100th date to be plotted on the x-axis?

Thanks already for your help.

Answer 1

[Julian Hapke]

set(gca, 'XTick', 1:100:n, 'XTickLabel', dates(1:100:n,:));

Answer 2

[Star Strider]

Consider the datetick function.