Tables: Transform Variablenames

Hi

I downloaded data from an excel worksheet to matlab. Matlab creates a table. Matlab inserts the first row of the data in excel (which are dates in the format 2/28/2019) as the variable names in the format x2_28_2019. Isn't it possible to extract the original variable names in Properties.VariableDescriptions (without mentioning "Original column heading:"). So that I can transform the dates coming from excel to dateformat in matlab?

Answer 1

[Peter Perkins]

It's easy to turn 'x2_28_2019' into a datetime, that's just

>> datetime('x2_28_2019','InputFormat','''x''MM_dd_yyyy')
ans = 
  datetime
   28-Feb-2019

You can do that on t.Properties.VariableNames to convert them all.

The more difficult question is what do you want to do with them next? You can't use datetimes as the variable names of a table, although you can use them as the row times of a timetable -- rotating 90 deg, in effect.

Answer 2

[dpb]

...,'ReadVariableNames',0);      % use the named parameters as needed

See

doc readtable

Also, in general,

doc detectImportOptions

and Matlab will probably auto-detect the situation for you...