how to join the values of different cells in different columns in one cell ?

Is there a way that might allow me to combine several columns of a table in one column and put the values of their cells together in one cell. for example I have the table shown below, the first five columns are for the year, month, day, hour, minute. Would I be able to join them all together in one column such that the values would have such representation: 19961211720 where 1996 is the year, 12 is the month, 1 is the day , 17 is the hour and 20 is the minute.

anyone can help?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

T.Date = datetime(T.Year, T.Month, T.Day, T.Hour, T.Min, 0, 'Format', 'uuuuMMddhhmm');

Note: I did not use the format you asked for. You asked for a single digit for the day, but I used two digits for the day. Even in the case where you might happen to know that only a single digit will ever be used, using a single digit is non-standard and makes things harder to understand all around.

[MA]

Thank you very much, exactly what I need. Having a single digit for the day is a mistake from my side as you said it is non-standard.

[MA]

Is there any modification I can add to keep the hours in 24hr format not 12hr format? (i.e. to have for the HOUR value 17 instead of 05).

[Walter Roberson]

T.Date = datetime(T.Year, T.Month, T.Day, T.Hour, T.Min, 0, 'Format', 'uuuuMMddHHmm');

Answer 2

[Simon Chan]

Suppose you read the file using function readtable and the name of the table is T, then variable C in the following will give you the required format.

format longG
Ncol = 5;
A=table2array(T(:,1:Ncol));
B=compose(repmat('%d',1,Ncol),A);
C=str2double(B)