How to compare date in table to Today's date?

I have a case were I have an excel (.xlsx) file that has data associated with dates. The dates are not in any order and some are in the past. I only need the data from today and in the future and then sort the data/dates from closest to today, to furthest into the future. My current idea to approach this issue is to compare Today's date to each date in the excel and make a new array that will consist of "1" or "0" to denote if the date is in the past or not. Since the date from the excel sheet comes into matlab as a 1x1 cell, I am using extractBetween and str2double to turn the day, month and year into numbers I can put into datetime. The issue is that the date in the excel sheet can come in x/x/xxxx, xx/x/xxxx, or xx/xx/xxxx and I can only set up the extractBetween to set values. The first few dates are: 7/25/2011, 8/26/2016, 7/11/2016, 12/1/2016, 12/1/2016, 2/7/2017, 3/14/2017, 2/22/2017, 3/2/2017, 3/16/2017. The code runs correctly until it reaches 12/1/2016. How do I fix this/is there a better way to do this?

Code:

[num, txt, raw] = xlsread('example.xlsx');

tod = date;
a = size(raw);
numrows = a(1,1);
datecol = 4;
currentrow = 3;
i = 1;
ad = [1;1]; 

while i == 1
    d = raw(currentrow,datecol);
    mon = extractBetween(d,1,2); 
    da = extractBetween(d,3,4); 
    ye = extractBetween(d,6,9); 
    newmon = str2double(mon); 
    newda = str2double(da); 
    newye = str2double(ye); 
    if newmon > 0 
        t = datetime(newye, newmon, newda); 
    else
        mon = extractBetween(d,1,1);
        newmon = str2double(mon);
        t = datetime(newye, newmon, newda);
    end
    if newda > 0 
        t = datetime(newye, newmon, newda); 
    else
        da = extractBetween(d,3,3);
        newda = str2double(da);
        t = datetime(newye, newmon, newda);
    end
    if tod > t
        ad = [ad; 0];
        currentrow = currentrow + 1;
        if numrows >= currentrow
            i = 1;
        else
            i = 0;
        end
    else
        ad = [ad; 1];
        currentrow = currentrow + 1;
        if numrows >= currentrow
            i = 1;
        else
            i = 0;
        end
    end
end

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

You probably want to call datetime with the 'ConvertFrom' and/or 'InputFormat' options. The 'excel' or 'excel1904' values for the 'ConvertFrom' option may be of use to you. For the 'InputFormat', see the table of identifiers you can use as part of that format in the description of the Format property on the datetime documentation page. There are identifiers that can handle month numbers (with one or two digits) and day of the month numbers (with one or two digits.)

Alternately, instead of calling xlsread and post-processing the data you might want to call readtable (perhaps setting the import options, which you could create using detectImportOptions, to specify how readtable should import date and time data.)

[Alex Young]

Thank you so much!