MATLAB - Only First Letter of String is Printing

Question

I am having an issue printing a string in MATLAB (2012a) using the fprtinf command (and sprintf ).

I have an array of 12 dates (numeric). I am converting them to strings using the following command:

months = datestr(data(:,1)-365,12); %Mar13 format

I obtain the following (and desired) output when I call the months variable:

Jan12
Feb12
Mar12
Apr12
etc..

The issue is when I call the fprintf or sprintf , say with the following code:

fprintf('%s', months(1))

I will only get the first letter of the month and not the full string. Any idea how to make it print the full string?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The resulting data type for your months variable is an NxM character array. You need to process it as a cell array of strings instead.

dates = num2cell(data(:,1)-365)
months = cellfun(@(x) datestr(x,12),dates,'UniformOutput',false)
fprintf('%s', months{1})

should get you what you want.

Answer 2

Simply change your call to

fprintf('%s', months(1, :))

datestr returns the string of each of the supplied dates on a separate row.

Alternatively you could use the cellstr function to convert the result to a cell array (this would also work with non fixed-length date formats like 'dddd' )

months = cellstr(months);
fprintf('%s', months{1});