Is there a way to plot multiple files using a loop in matlab?

I want to use a for loop to plot data from a range of files whos names are string values. This is the code I am using:

 %Convert variable year from integer to string
yr=num2str(17);
dy=num2str(15);
mn=num2str(3);

 yr2 = num2str(17);
dy2 = num2str(4);
mn2 = num2str(4);

 %Create a MMDDYY string 
date_str=[mn '-' dy '-' yr];
date_str2=[mn2 '-' dy2 '-' yr2];

 for i = date_str:date_str2

is there a way I can plot the data from 3-15-17 to 4-4-17, which are in excel files? I already have programs in which I can plot an individual day, I just want to be able to plot a range of days.

Answer 1

[Jason Whitfield]

Instead of manually creating date strings, try using the datetime object. It can be iterated like you want, and then you can create a string representing the filename using the datestr function.

[Brandon Bush]

I couldn't use datetime to get the conversion, however, I could use datenum, which is the number of days since jan 0, 0000 instead of Jan 0 1900 for datetime.

[Jason Whitfield]

Is there any particular reason you can't use datetime? The following code seems to accomplish what you're looking for:

for day = datetime(17, 3, 15):datetime(17, 4, 4)
  disp(datestr(day, 'mm-dd-yy'));
end

[Brandon Bush]

It was saying that the input must be a matrix with three or six columns but I mightve just been putting in the data wrong