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matlabdate
Argyll
Argyll

Reputation: 9875

Why do 4 days in the output of datetime() correspond to 1 month and 4 days with datestr() in Matlab?

I am running into the following problem in Matlab 2019a.

>> datestr(datetime('20190927','InputFormat','yyyyMMdd')-datetime('20190923','InputFormat','yyyyMMdd'),'yyyymmdd')
ans =
    '00000104'

Why is the answer 1 month 4 days? Shouldn't it be zero month 4 days?

EDIT:

I realize that arithmetic on datetime arrays create duration arrays. But I don't know how to set format of duration arrays after doing arithmetic on datetime arrays or how to retrieve the duration data in a format free way.

Datetime arithmetic is what I need. So I am asking the question so I can do datetime arithmetic without issue.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 44

Answers (1)

Cris Luengo
Cris Luengo

Reputation: 60504

d = datetime('20190927','InputFormat','yyyyMMdd')-datetime('20190923','InputFormat','yyyyMMdd')

returns:

d = 
  duration
   96:00:00

That is, 96 hours. Converting this to a date string results in January 4th. If you start counting hours from midnight on the year 0, 96 hours later you end up on January 4th. There's no 0th month.

What you can do is this:

d = duration(d,'Format','dd:hh:mm:ss')

which returns:

d = 
  duration
   04:00:00:00

You can also do:

d = days(d)

which returns:

d =
     4

Upvotes: 1

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