Iterating numbers within a string (Matlab)

Question

In Matlab I am trying to achieve the following:

I need to provide an end date, which I would like to iterate forward by quarter in the format: '1970q1' For this I have made a loop.

for yy=1970:1971
    for jj=1:4
        fprintf('''%dq%d''',(yy),(jj))        
    end
end

However, when I set enddate=fprintf

for yy=1970:1971
    for jj=1:4
        enddate=fprintf('''%dq%d''',(yy),(jj))        
    end
end

within the loop, it does not store the end date as what the fprintf output is, but something else. The way the end date should be stored is: enddate='1970q1'

Answer 1

You should use sprintf function for creating strings instead of fprintf that writes text to file.

In your case, if you want to save all the enddate values you should save it in a vector:

enddate = [];
for yy=1970:1971
    for jj=1:4
        enddate=[enddate sprintf('''%dq%d''',(yy),(jj))];      
    end
end