Is it possible to change a double with exonents so no exp or decimal?

I am trying to change dates in cells in the form [19861001010000] (yyyy mm dd hh mmmm) to a number that I can parse into the year, month, etc. I used G = [cellfun(@str2num,Date(:,1))]; because I had a column of cell dates after using textscan to import data. This gave me a column of numbers in exponential notation (eg. 1.9861e+13). In order to parse this number I need this column to be whole numbers, I think (eg. 19861001010000). And then I plan to extract the year, month etc. to make a graph. Any advice about how I should approach this?

Answer 1

[Shaun VanWeelden]

OK, I would absolutely leave it as a string until it is finished parsing!

The 1.9861e+13 still represents all values by the way, but that doesn't matter in this approach.

I would just do something like str='19861001010000'

year=str(1:4);year=str2double(year);

OR more compact

month=str2double(str(5:6));

the idea being you simply convert one portion of your date at a time to a double value.

Instead of making 6 variables, you can also do date(1)=year; date(2)=month, etc. or just do:

date=[ str2double(str(1:4)) str2double(str(5:6)) etc.. ];