Trying to convert 6 digit number to a date

I have a table of values such as '060724' that I want to convert to dates so that I can then sort them by date but when I use datetime() I can't seem to get it to work. So for the example above I would want it to say '6th July 2024' so is there a way to do it? My code is

date = 060724

dates(x,:) = datetime(date,'Locale','en_GB','InputFormat','D-MM-uu');

Answer 1

[Shivam]

Hi Simeon,

The format 'D-MM-uu' you are using won't work because it doesn't match the structure of your input string. Instead, you should use 'ddMMyy' as the InputFormat since your string represents the day, month, and year without any delimiters.

% Example date string
dateStr = '060724';

% Convert to datetime
dateObj = datetime(dateStr, 'InputFormat', 'ddMMyy', 'Format', 'd MMMM yyyy');

% Display the result
disp(dateObj);

   6 July 2024

You can visit the documentation of datetime to know more:

• https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/datetime.html

Hope it helps.

[Simeon]

Brilliant thanks

[Walter Roberson]

Note too that the input to datetime() is a character vector (or string) rather than numeric.

datetime() does have the ability to convert some kinds of numeric values, using the ConvertFrom option, but mmddyy is not one of the supported options. (yyyymmdd is a supported option though.)