Your output "l" is a character array, of dimension 96x8. The first row of that array can be displayed with
>> l(1,:)
rather than
>> l(1)
which is only the first character.
The reason that l(1:9) gave the output that you saw is the MATLAB is pulling the first 9 characters going down the first column.
You could convert that character array to a 96x1 cell array, where each row will be put into one element of the cell array, using
>> timeCell = cellstr(l)
Then,
>> timeCell{1}
would be the entire first row. (Note the curly brackets in that last expression, which are used to access the contents of the cell, rather than the cell itself.)
