How to work with Unix timestamps in Matlab?

Question

I have some data files with Unix timestamps (in this case, number of milliseconds since Jan 1, 1970 00:00 UTC). I would like to convert these to human-friendly date/time str

Answer 1

Newer versions of MATLAB (verified in R2015a) have a datetime type that is useful for working with and formatting dates and times. You can convert UNIX timestamps into a MATLAB datetime with

dt = datetime( unix_time, 'ConvertFrom', 'posixtime' );

and then use datestr as before for formatting as a string

datestr( dt )