Time format printing too much

I want to label the time axis in a plot with "ddd: HH" (speak "first three letters of the day, then the two digits for the hour in 24-hour format).

However, when doing this, the format is applied for some labels, but otheres also print more information like month, day and year.

% generate time sequence, last 3 days, 12 hours offset
xtickformat('eee: HH')
t2 = datetime('today'),
t1 = t2-days(3)

xData = t1:hours(12):t2

set(gca,'xtick',xData) 

Leads to:

Answer 1

[dpb]

I presume your complaint is the range label automagically shown for datetime axes. Seems there should be a way for user to turn that on/off, but doesn't appear to be...

The following generates

t2 = datetime('today');
t1 = t2-days(3);
xData = t1:hours(12):t2;
hL=plot(xData,randn(size(xData)));
xticks(xData)
xtickformat('eee: HH')
hAx=gca;                         % get current axes handle
hXAx=hAx.XAxis;                  % retrieve handle to xaxis datetime ruler object
hXAx.SecondaryLabel.String='';   % set the limits label string to empty

The SecondaryLabel property is hidden one -- used the FEX submission of Yair Altman to discover the name of the nondisclosed properties.

NB: Until the axes is created as a datetime ruler object, xtickformat will fail as will xticks as default requires double. At least thru R2017b here--perhaps later releases will automagically convert the axis type as needed; can't test that here but I'd be somewhat surprised.

[black]

Thank you! This solved it.