How to store time data separated by colon (e.g 15:59:51:111) as a single data point in a matrix?

Imagine you collected some data on your location vs time. This data is presented as a line of numbers as follows: Time1, Latitude1, Longitude1, Time2, Latitude2,Longitude2.... How to make a matrix out of this data if every "time" point is stored as "h : min : sec" separated by colon. In other words, how to prevent matlab from attempting to create a vector out of time units separated by colon?

Example of data:

time,Latitude,Longitude,

15:59:51:111,25.43734933,55.49849743,

15:59:52:098,25.43705392,55.49978615,

15:59:53:098,25.43645533,55.50090108,

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Assuming that you are reading from a file

%overhead to get the data into a file
S = [
"time,Latitude,Longitude,"
"15:59:51:111,25.43734933,55.49849743,"
"15:59:52:098,25.43705392,55.49978615,"
"15:59:53:098,25.43645533,55.50090108,"
    ];

filename = tempname;

writelines(S, filename);


%actual work
opt = detectImportOptions(filename);
opt = setvartype(opt, 'time', 'string');

T = readtable(filename, opt);
modtime = regexprep(T.time, ':(\d\d\d)$', '.$1');
T.time = duration(modtime)

T = 3×3 table
      time      Latitude    Longitude
    ________    ________    _________

    15:59:51     25.437      55.498  
    15:59:52     25.437        55.5  
    15:59:53     25.436      55.501  

If you have the data in some other form, not in a file, then we would have to know how it is represented now in order to advise you.

[Kirill Kurzanov]

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate your help.

My data is stored in .uu format, which translates into the text line of data points. Could you hint me on how to import this data into matlab so that it is separated into according coloums, please?

[Walter Roberson]

Please attach a sample file. zip it and attach the zip

.uu files used to be used to store UUENCODE data, which is not used much these days, having been mostly replaced by base64 encoding which is similar.

[Kirill Kurzanov]

Thank you for your quick response. I have attached the requested file below.

[Walter Roberson]

The below code is tested for that particular input file, which has a blank line at the beginning. If you were using other files that did not have the leading blank line, you would not use 'headerlines', 1

filename = 'Sample.uu';

opt = detectImportOptions(filename, 'Filetype', 'text', 'headerlines', 1);
opt = setvartype(opt, 'time', 'string');

T = readtable(filename, opt);
modtime = regexprep(T.time, ':(\d\d\d)$', '.$1');
T.time = duration(modtime);

Answer 2

[Jan]

Use a table instead of a matrix:

Time = datetime({'15:59:51:111'; '15:59:52:098'; '15:59:53:098'}, ...
    'InputFormat', 'HH:mm:ss:SSS', 'Format', 'HH:mm:ss.SSS');
Data = [25.43734933,55.49849743; ...
        25.43705392,55.49978615; ...
        25.43645533,55.50090108];

T = table(Time, Data(:, 1), Data(:, 2))

T = 3×3 table
        Time         Var2      Var3 
    ____________    ______    ______

    15:59:51.111    25.437    55.498
    15:59:52.098    25.437      55.5
    15:59:53.098    25.436    55.501