在Matlab / Octave中加载FRED季度数据

Question

I am trying to load quarterly data from the US Federal Reserve, Economic Data (FRED) into Matlab (actually Octave, but that shouldn't make a difference right?).

The problem is that the FRED lists quarterly dates in a different way, eg 2013 Q2 is: 2013-04-01

When I download the data (Excel only) and convert to .csv, and then load this, the minuses are interpreter as new colums. So that I end up with a year, -month, and -1 column.

What is a good way to convert this to quarters for Matlab/Octave?

Answer 1

You can specify the format in which your date strings are handled in matlab. For example if xlsread reads your date as a 'yyyy-mm-dd' string, as seems to be the case in FRED:

dateStr1 = '2013-04-01';
date1 = datenum(dateStr1,'yyyy-mm-dd'); 

And if you wish to display the date in 'yyyy qq' format use datestr(date1,'yyyy qq')

Conversely,

dateStr2 = '2013 Q2';
date2 = datenum(dateStr2,'yyyy qq');