MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Specify Time Zones

In MATLAB, a time zone includes the time offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC),

the daylight saving time offset, and a set of historical changes to those values. The time

zone setting is stored in the TimeZone property of each datetime array. When you

create a datetime, it is unzoned by default. That is, the TimeZone property of the

datetime is empty (''). If you do not work with datetime values from multiple time zones

and do not need to account for daylight saving time, you might not need to specify this

property.

You can specify a time zone when you create a datetime, using the 'TimeZone' name-

value pair argument. The time zone value 'local' specifies the system time zone. To

display the time zone offset for each datetime, include a time zone offset specifier such as

'Z' in the value for the 'Format' argument.

t = datetime(2014,3,8:9,6,0,0,'TimeZone','local',...

'Format','d-MMM-y HH:mm:ss Z')

t =

8-Mar-2014 06:00:00 -0500 9-Mar-2014 06:00:00 -0400

A different time zone offset is displayed depending on whether the datetime occurs during

daylight saving time.

You can modify the time zone of an existing datetime. For example, change the TimeZone

property of t using dot notation. You can specify the time zone value as the name of a

time zone region in the IANA Time Zone Database. A time zone region accounts for the

current and historical rules for standard and daylight offsets from UTC that are observed

in that geographic region.

t.TimeZone = 'Asia/Shanghai'

t =

8-Mar-2014 19:00:00 +0800 9-Mar-2014 18:00:00 +0800

You also can specify the time zone value as a character vector of the form +HH:mm or -

HH:mm, which represents a time zone with a fixed offset from UTC that does not observe

daylight saving time.

t.TimeZone = '+08:00'

7 Dates and Time