How to count the number of hours with reference to a MATLAB formatted date?

Using MATLAB datenum function, one can generate date patterns like 7.3560e+05. This represents 03-Jan-2014 02:00:00.

If I want to count the number of hours (for e.g. in this case: 50 hrs) of this number from 01-Jan-2013 00:00:00, how can I do it? I want to generalize for any datenum formatted date.

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Joseph Cheng]

the number returned from datenum is in days. so if we go

 time1 = datenum(datestr(now));
 pause(1);
 time2 = datenum(datestr(now));
 deltaTime = (time2-time1)*24*60*60

then we should get deltaTime = 1 (second). So to count the hours we can go

 time1 = datenum(datestr(now));
 current_time = datestr(time1)
 twodayslater = datestr(time1+50/24)

such that the 50 hours later is 2days 2 hours so we can see that when comparing the current_time to twodayslater.

[Joseph Cheng]

so for your arbitrary datestr formatted date you can go

 datestr(datenum(' 01-Jan-2013 00:00:00') +50/24)

As long as your date string is accepted into datenum you can go back and forth.

[Ashish]

Thanks Joseph for the detailed explanation. Certainly helped.