MATLAB: How to sort rows of a cell array by date/time when the other columns are different data types

cell arraydata typesdatedatetimesortsortrowstime

How to sort rows of a cell array by date/time when the other columns are different data types? In the cell array the first column is notes about the row, the second column is the date and time, the third and fourth are numbers. I would like to sort the entire cell array based on the date and time in ascending order. Is there a way to do this?

Best Answer

I assume your date time are stored in strings. Here is a simple approach
% some data
C = {'A' datestr(now)  1 11 ; 'B' datestr(now-100) 2 22 ; 'C' datestr(now+100) 3 33}
% sort on dates, keep the sorting indices
[~,ix] = sort(datenum(C(:,2)))
% sort cell rows accordingly
OutC = C(ix,:)
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