How to extract information on year when data is in quarterly format

My data is in the following format:

Year

1971-Q1

1971-Q2

1971-Q3

1971-Q4

1972-Q1

1972-Q2

1972-Q3

1972-Q4... until the 4th quarter of 2018. I have data on inflation and unemployment for this period and would like to plot it in the same graph with 'Year' on the xaxis. How do I extract only the years to a seperate variable, ie, the first four numbers of the variable 'Year' ?

Answer 1

[Nicolas B.]

have you thought about using extractBefore() function?

For example:

function year = extractYear(s)
    year = str2double(extractBefore(s, '-'));  
end