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Newbie question about date format

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012786534
012786534 on 16 May 2016
Closed: MATLAB Answer Bot on 20 Aug 2021
Hi all, I have a 100 x 1 cell array with with a date format like 19-7-66 that I want to change into 19-September-1966. How would I do that? Thanks
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Guillaume
Guillaume on 16 May 2016
Note that xx-7-xx is July not September!

Answers (2)

Steven Lord
Steven Lord on 16 May 2016
Are the contents of your cell array datetime objects? If so take a look at the documentation for the Format property. If they are not datetime objects but just plain char vectors, consider converting them into datetime objects ( the documentation includes examples of how to convert a char vector into a datetime, including how to specify the format with which the char vector should be interpreted.)

Guillaume
Guillaume on 16 May 2016
Assuming your cell array is an array of string, you would have to convert it first to datenum or datevec and then back to datestring, each time providing the correct format string:
datestr(datenum(yourcellarray, 'dd-mm-yy'), 'dd-mmm-yyyy')
However, I would recommend you actually convert your cell array to the newish datetime and stay with that. You can change the Format property of the datetime objects to display what you want (and use char to get a char array):
d = datetime(yourcellarray, 'InputFormat', 'dd-MM-yy'); %note that format strings for datetime differ from datestr
d.Format = 'dd-MMM-yyyy'
d %display d
char(d) %convert to char array

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