Converting Time to Numeric (Not Date)

I have a large dataset which I have to index on time. My data set will have large rows and 5 coloumns. One of the coloumns will be time denoted by HH:MM:SS. E.g 09:55:47. I have to index my numeric data based on the time. When I import my data, the data gets split into text data and numeric data. Unfortunately time goes into text data. When I tried using datanum converter, it gives me junk values because this is not date, rather time. Matlab has datenum to convert data into a numeric. datenum also converts Date with time to a numeric. But just time alone cannot be converted to a numeric directly. And this is my requirement as I want the time increments to be converted to numeric increments (which is the bare minimum to do my coding). I would be grateful for help on this.

Answer 1

[Sachin Ganjare]

Did you try 'datevec' function?

[Aravind]

datavec needs the date also. When I give time as input, it gives a junk date appended with the converted time. Eg, 09:55:45 would return 2012 1 1 09 55 45. An extra junk three coloumns.