Convert clock time to decimal

Hi, I want to convert cell2mat, but there are some times (clock time) values in my data. That's why I couldn't convert it. How can I convert time value to decimal? Is there any other way to convert in to matrix without changing the time value in to decimal? My time value format is hh:mm:ss.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

Use the datenum function on your ‘clock time’ values. If you just want the time of day, the fractional numbers (the part of the date number to the right of the decimal) are in decimal fractions of a day, so you need to do no other conversions. Get the day fraction by using the rem or mod functions.

Example:

t = {'12:34:56'};
dnt = datenum(t)
day_frac = rem(dnt,1)

dnt =
          736330.524259259

day_frac =
         0.524259259225801

EDIT — You can of course combine these into one assignment:

day_frac = rem(datenum(t),1)

[suchitra rani]

I have nearly 50 time values in excel. I want to convert it to decimal in Matlab .When I tried to read it in Matlab as matfile , it shows error as "Attempts to reference field of non-structure array ".How can I convert all time values into decimal.

[Walter Roberson]

Please show your code

[Etikaf Hussain]

This may be of help:

datetime(x,'ConvertFrom','excel')

where x is the array containing time values.

Answer 2

[Peter Perkins]

It sounds very likely that you have some sort of table in Excel that has columns of numbers and also a column of times. If that is true, your best bet is to use readtable to bring them into MATLAB. It's really hard to say how the times will be read in, it depends on how they are stored in the spreadsheet. Likely as text, in which case you will want to convert them to datetimes or durations.