converting abbreviation of months to numerical value

I have a large 1244x1 cell that contains jan, feb, mar,...ect and repeats. Is there an easy way to convert these to their respective numerical value (jan = 1, feb = 2, ...).

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Ameer Hamza]

Try something like this

C = {'jan', 'Mar', 'feb'}; % for example
M = month(cellfun(@(x) datetime(x, 'InputFormat', 'MMM'), C));

[Ted McG]

I am receiving the following error now:

Error using project (line 27)

Subscripting into a table using one subscript (as in t(i)) or three or more

subscripts (as in t(i,j,k)) is not supported. Always specify a row subscript

and a variable subscript, as in t(rows,vars).

[Ameer Hamza]

Is your data available as a table? Can you attach it as a .mat file?

Answer 2

[Stephen23]

ismember makes this easy:

>> D = {'mar','apr','nov','may'}; % your data
>> C = {'jan','feb','mar','apr','may','jun','jul','aug','sep','oct','nov','dec'};
>> [~,X] = ismember(lower(D),C)
X =
    3    4   11    5

Answer 3

[Star Strider]

Another approach:

mnth_nr = @(mth) find(strcmpi(mth, {'jan','feb','mar','apr','may','jun','jul','aug','sep','oct','nov','dec'}));

This works with a single input:

Out = mnth_nr('May')

producing:

Out =
     5

and can be vectorised using cellfun with a table:

T1 = cell2table({'Feb'; 'jul'; 'Dec'})                  % Create Table To Test Code
Out2 = cellfun(@(x)mnth_nr(x), T1.Var1)

producing:

T1 =

  3×1 table

     Var1  
    _______

    {'Feb'}
    {'jul'}
    {'Dec'}


Out2 =
     2
     7
    12

.