extracting dates within a text

Good day all,

I have a csv file with texts and and dates mixed in each cell. I need to extract the dates that follow a specific text and store them in cell arrays. Example: "MovExperiment/MovingBarParameters started at 2018-04-17_09-32-11"; please see highlighted cells in the attached image.

What is the efficient way to do this?

Thanks,

Sadegh

[dpb]

Dunno and can't experiment without a copy of the significant portion of the file to look at.

Attach a (smallish) section of the file, not an image.

Answer 1

[dpb]

matchstr='LoomingExp';                            % string to match
c=textread('book1.csv','%s','delimiter','');      % read as cellstr array
c=char(c(contains(c,matchstr)));                  % save those with matching string/convert to char array
dt=datetime(c(:,end-18:end),'InputFormat','yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm-ss');  % convert date strings to datetime

textread has been deprecated by TMW, but it's still useful in being able to do many things without the bother of having to have a file handle but using the filename directly.

[Sadegh Nabavi]

Thanks a lot. The only change I needed to make to your script is to insert:

c = cellfun(@(c) c(end-18:end), c, 'un', 0);.

Otherwise, I get the error message:

Error using datetime (line 636)

Unable to convert the text to datetime using the format 'yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm-ss'.

matchstr='LoomingExp';                        
c=textread('Book1.csv','%s','delimiter','');  
c=c(contains(c,matchstr));                    
c = cellfun(@(c) c(end-18:end), c, 'un', 0); 
dt=datetime(c,'InputFormat','yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm-ss'); 

[dpb]

Oh. I had done char() to convert to character array at command line but missed it when cut and pasted...

c=char(c(contains(c,'LoomingExp')));

Updated Answer

[Sadegh Nabavi]

Thanks a lot. It works smoothly.