Dates and Time in MATLAB

MATLAB provides many ways to deal with date and time in form of DateTime, calendar duration, and duration data types. These data types do not only support storing and representing date-times but, also allow operations on date time. We shall look at these three data types separately.

DateTime

The datetime data type specifically records/represents an instant in time. For example, the datetime function alone returns the current datetime, accurate up to the second. 

Datetime provides various options; let us look at them.

Example 1:

Matlab

% MATLAB code for DateTime
% option1
datetime

% option2
datetime(YEAR, MONTH, DATE)

% option3
datetime(YEAR, MONTH, DAY, HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND)

Output:

MATLAB also allows users to create DateTime arrays from vectors. 

Example 2:

Matlab

% MATLAB code for create DateTime arrays from vectors
% years
year = [2013, 2023];

% Months
month = [1,3];

% Dates
date = [31, 29];
datetime(year, month, date)

Output:

Calendar Duration:

This data type creates arrays of time elapsed in variable calendar units. This data type provides 5 functions for creating arrays of variable units. 

• cal months – For creating arrays with the monthly differences in units.
• call quarters – For creating arrays with quarterly differences in units.
• calyears – For creating arrays with the yearly difference in units.
• caldays – For creating arrays with daily differences in units.
• calweeks – For creating arrays with the weekly differences in units.

Example 3:

Matlab

% MATLAB Code for calendar Duration
calyears(1:2)
calquarters(1)
calmonths(1:5)

Output:

We can perform operations on DateTime arrays and calendar duration arrays.

Example 4:

Matlab

% MATLAB code for datetime array
dt = datetime(2022,11,29);
c = calmonths(1:5);

dt+c

Output:

This would create a new array with these values:

The same could be done with different calendar duration arrays.

Duration:

The duration arrays are similar to calendar duration arrays with the only difference being the length of elapsed time. This data type takes fixed time units and has the following fixed functions of time length:

• years
• days
• hours
• minutes
• seconds
• milliseconds

Example 5:

Matlab

% MATLAB Code for duration
years(1:5)
days(1:2)
milliseconds(1:7)

Output:

We can also perform operations on these arrays.

Example 6:

Matlab

% MATLAB code for hours array
h = hours(1:5)

% date
dt = datetime("today")

% operation
dt - h

Output: