Problem with importing data: specifier "dd" does not include the 31st day of the month

I'm trying to import data from a .dat file (see attached). The file contains 7 whitespace-separated fields per line, the first 5 say the following (last two are measured values): 1. Year 2. Month 3. Day 4. Hour 5. Minutes

e.g.: 1995 02 01 04 00

The import function gives me a screen with predefined column splitters. I used the available functions to specify the date formats. For all except one this works: the specifier "dd" doesn't seem to recognize '31' as a valid day of the month, and returns NaT.

I generated a function from this as to show what I did when importing the data.

Regards, Wessel

Edit: the forum doesn't allow me to attach .dat files.

[Kuifeng]

Would you upload a sample .dat file and your code?

[Wessel]

The data is available here (although formatted): http://browse.ceda.ac.uk/browse/badc/hyrex/data/Common/catch_avgs/raingauge

I tried it with the "brue0001.dat.Z" file

[Kuifeng]

I do not see the problem you mentioned.

[Wessel]

That's peculiar, mine looks like above picture.

Could it be that our versions of Matlab packages differ and that mine is old/erroneous?

[Kuifeng]

Sorry I did not use your .m file, I just double clicked the .dat file in Matlab workspace, and the data was imported.

Answer 1

[Kuifeng]

 data = importdata('brue0001.dat');

[Wessel]

This option doesn't allow to specify columns as date. Therefore, I used the 'import data' (in the Home tab) to open the data. There, I specified the third column as 'dd', and this doesn't seem to recognize '31'.

[Kuifeng]

after import data, can use dd = data(:,3). what is the purpose of attached complicated code?

 Year = Data(:,1);
Mth= Data(:,2);
DD = = Data(:,3);
%... and other columns

[Wessel]

You can do that, but then the column is not characterized as a date column, but as a double. In the latter case, the first 9 days are displayed as 01, 02 etc. The attached code is created with the 'Import Data' function that you can find in the 'Home' tab in the 'Variable' toolstrip. With that function, columns can be specified as date columns.

[Kuifeng]

Also, after selecting the date format of Year, Mth, Day, Hr, Min, the data is OK as below.