Skip certain times in datetime plot

I am trying to plot timeseries data using the MATLAB R2014b "datetime" method to enable nice features such as auto-zooming in to timestamps, etc. The following is an example:

 dataToPlot = 

 '21/01/2015 09:00:00' '1'
 '21/01/2015 10:00:00' '2'
 '21/01/2015 11:00:00' '3'
 '21/01/2015 12:00:00' '4'
 '22/01/2015 09:00:00' '5'
 '22/01/2015 10:00:00' '6'
 '22/01/2015 11:00:00' '7'
 '22/01/2015 12:00:00' '8'

So I would use "datetime" on the first column, and plot it against the second column. The problem is, the data on Jan 21 is from 9am - 12pm, the next data point is on Jan 22 at 9am, but "datetime" will fill a large portion of the central part of the graph will interpolated values between data '4' and '5'. Is there a way to avoid this, so that I can still use datetime but restrict the plot to specific periods of interest?

Thanks, Hamad

Answer 1

[Michelle Hirsch]

If you want to plot all of the data, but to not connect the line between some values, you could inject a NaN in your data where you want the line to break.

Here's an example of how to do it with brute force:

% Create your data
t = [datetime(2015,1,21,[9:12],0,0) datetime(2015,1,22,[9:12],0,0)]
d = 1:8;

% Inject the NaN into d. and put something into t. Doesn't matter what,
% since it won't plot.
d = [d(1:4) NaN d(5:end)];
t = [t(1:4) t(end) t(5:end)];

% Plot it
plot(t,d)

[Hamad]

Thank you very much Michelle. We're almost there, but what I am really after is to not plot anything at all in the gap period. Your example indeed removes the line between data points 4 and 5, but the x-axis still contains times between 21st at 12pm and 22nd at 9am, therefore a large "blank".

The ideal solution is one in which the x-axis contains a "break", hence no gap. One way I can do this is to play around with XTick and XTickLabel, but ideally I would like to do it with datetime plot because datetime has a nice feature that relabels the x-axis ticks when you zoom in/out.

Thanks, Hamad

[Sagar]

Dear Hamad, did you find a way to do this? I want to do exactly the same thing as you want.

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/3683-breakxaxis

However, this might not be compatible with datetime plots -- or at least it probably is not compatible with the automatic label changes upon zooming.