That code is a bit buggy, and it is not doing what you think it is:
- Some structures are "preallocated" using repmat(struct(...)), but when you read the documentation for the function datevec you will learn that it does not output a structure but in fact a numeric array. So this preallocation is useless because it creates an array of the wrong type.
- On every iteration you completely reassign the variables date, dateStart and dateEnd, so on every loop iteration they get completely redefined. This happens because you do not use any indexing to allocate the output into a new element on each iteration. This is also why the incorrect "preallocation" does not cause any error.
- Using the variable name date is a bad idea, as this shadows the inbuilt date function. You can check variable names using which.
- the continue operations are not required, they do absolutely nothing useful in this code.
A simpler alternative is to use MATLAB more efficiently:
>> S(3).locs = '2015-03-31';
>> S(2).locs = '2015-02-28';
>> S(1).locs = '2015-01-01';
>> datevec(vertcat({S.locs}))
ans =
2015 1 1 0 0 0
2015 2 28 0 0 0
2015 3 31 0 0 0
OR if the date strings have different lengths or might be missing:
>> X = cellfun(@datevec,{S.locs}','UniformOutput',false);
>> cell2mat(X)
ans =
2015 1 1 0 0 0
2015 2 28 0 0 0
2015 3 31 0 0 0
