Is there a way to convert times in this format to double, so I can perform mathematical operations on them?

Hi folks,

I have an array of times that looks like this:

[1059, 1100, 1101...]

where 1059 = 59 minutes past 10am. I need to work out the elapsed number of minutes for each consequent element of the array. However, if I were to deduct 100-1059, I get 41 instead of 1.

Whilst there is a roundabout way of doing this, I was wondering if there's functionality in Matlab that will allow me to do this in a more elegant way?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

How do you know that 100 represents 1 PM instead of 1 AM? Would it make more sense to adjust x so it includes 1300 instead of 100?

x = [1059, 1100, 1101, 100];
m = mod(x, 100);
h = (x-m)/100;
% Adjust h here using your rules so that 100 represents 1 PM instead of 1 AM
d = hours(h) + minutes(m);
d.Format = 'hh:mm'

d = 1×4 duration array
   10:59   11:00   11:01   01:00

difference = diff(d)

difference = 1×3 duration array
    00:01    00:01   -10:01

differenceInMinutes = minutes(difference)

differenceInMinutes = 1×3

1 1 -601

[Teshan Rezel]

@Steven Lord fantastic, thank you!

Answer 2

[Benjamin Thompson]

MATLAB has a lot of date and time functions, as described by the article "Dates and Time" in the help documentation. If you are able to convert your four digit time codes into strings where hours and minutes are separated by a colon:

t = datetime({'10:59', '11:00', '11:01'},'Format','HH:mm')

t =

1×3 datetime array

10:59 11:00 11:01

>> dt = diff(t)

dt =

1×2 duration array

00:01:00 00:01:00