Formats for Individual Date and Duration Arrays

datetime, duration, and calendarDuration arrays have a Format property that controls the display of values in each array. When you create a datetime array, it uses the MATLAB^® global default datetime display format unless you explicitly provide a format. Use dot notation to access the Format property to view or change its value. For example, to set the display format for the datetime array, t, to the default format, type:

t.Format = 'default'

Changing the Format property does not change the values in the array, only their display. For example, the following can be representations of the same datetime value (the latter two do not display any time components):

Thursday, August 23, 2012 12:35:00
August 23, 2012
23-Aug-2012

The Format property of the datetime, duration, and calendarDuration data types accepts different formats as inputs.

datetime Display Format

You can set the Format property to one of these character vectors.

To change the default formats, see Default datetime Format.

Alternatively, you can use the letters A-Z and a-z to specify a custom date format. You can include nonletter characters such as a hyphen, space, or colon to separate the fields. This table shows several common display formats and examples of the formatted output for the date, Saturday, April 19, 2014 at 9:41:06 PM in New York City.

For a complete list of valid symbolic identifiers, see the Format property for datetime arrays.

Note:   The letter identifiers that datetime accepts are different from those used by the datestr, datenum, and datevec functions.

duration Display Format

To display a duration as a single number that includes a fractional part (for example, 1.234 hours), specify one of these character vectors:

To specify the number of fractional digits displayed, user the format function.

To display a duration in the form of a digital timer, specify one of the following character vectors.

• 'dd:hh:mm:ss'

• 'hh:mm:ss'

• 'mm:ss'

• 'hh:mm'

You also can display up to nine fractional second digits by appending up to nine S characters. For example, 'hh:mm:ss.SSS' displays the milliseconds of a duration value to 3 digits.

Changing the Format property does not change the values in the array, only their display.

calendarDuration Display Format

Specify the Format property of a calendarDuration array as a character vector that can include the characters y, q, m, w, d, and t, in this order. The character vector must include m to display the number of months, d to display the number of days, and t to display the number of hours, minutes, and seconds. The y, q, and w characters are optional.

This table describes the date and time components that the characters represent.

To specify the number of digits displayed for fractional seconds, use the format function.

If the value of a date or time component is zero, it is not displayed.

Changing the Format property does not change the values in the array, only their display.

Default datetime Format

You can set default formats to control the display of datetime arrays created without an explicit display format. These formats also apply when you set the Format property of a datetime array to 'default' or 'defaultdate'. When you change the default setting, datetime arrays set to use the default formats are displayed automatically using the new setting.

Changes to the default formats persist across MATLAB sessions.

To specify a default format, type

datetime.setDefaultFormats('default',fmt)

datetime.setDefaultFormats('default','yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss')

In addition, you can specify a default format for datetimes created without time components. For example,

datetime.setDefaultFormats('defaultdate','yyyy-MM-dd')

To reset the both the default format and the default date-only formats to the factory defaults, type

datetime.setDefaultFormats('reset')

You also can set the default formats in the Preferences dialog box. For more information, see Set Command Window Preferences.