How to read time as string data from excel file

I used readtable to read time from excel spread sheets. The time was converted to double like e.x. But I want to read time as original form. How does read time as string?

e.x 10:11:09 AM => 0.42858

Answer 1

[Yutaka Yamada]

How about the below code if you want to use readtable?

opts = detectImportOptions('readTime.xlsx');
opts.VariableTypes = 'datetime'; 

T = readtable('readTime.xlsx', opts);
for i = 1:3
    a = T{i, 1};
    a.Format = 'HH:mm:ss a';
end

I've attached the Excel file that I've used for this test also.

[Siddharth Bhutiya]

You should use readtable, xlsread is not recommended and is there only for legacy support. Two comments on the code above 1. For a datetime array you can directly change the Format of the entire array at once, you do not need to do it element by element. 2. You can directly specify the display format in opts as follows:

>> opts = detectImportOptions('readTime.xlsx');
>> opts.VariableTypes = 'datetime';
>> opts.VariableOptions.DatetimeFormat = 'HH:mm:ss a';
>> T = readtable('readTime.xlsx', opts)

T =

  3×1 table

       Var1    
    ___________

    10:11:09 AM
    10:11:09 AM
    10:11:09 AM

[Yasuyuki Hamanaka]

Thank you both for answering. Actually the spreadsheet is the picture below. I want to read Var1 as date, Var2 as time and Var 3 and 4 asdouble. Do you know how to specify the format of each columns, if there's multiple variables?

[Yasuyuki Hamanaka]

I found the function setvaropts.

opts = detectImportOptions('input.xlsx');
opts = setvartype(opts,{'Var2'},'datetime');
opts = setvaropts(opts,{'Var2'},'DatetimeFormat','HH:mm:ss a');
schedule = readtable('input.xlsx',opts);

Thank you everyone for helping me. Your information were very helpful and I learned a lot.

Answer 2

[Sulaymon Eshkabilov]

Hi,

You should try using xlsread() in this case. In fact, xlsread is slower than readtable().

Then you can employ datenum() and datestr() if necessary.

Good luck.

[Yasuyuki Hamanaka]

Thank you for answering my question. I want to use readtable because the amount of data is so large that reading data takes long. But I didn't know the fucntion of datenum() and datestr(), so it is very helpful for me.