Table sort by month - matlab

Question

I have a table in MATLAB with attributes in the first three columns and data from the fourth column onwards. I was trying to sort the entire table based on the first three columns. However, one of the columns (Column C) contains months ('January', 'February' ...etc). The sortrows function would only let me choose 'ascend' or 'descend' but not a custom option to sort by month. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Below is the code I used.
sortrows(Table, {'Column A','Column B','Column C'} , {'ascend' , 'ascend' , '???' } )

Answer 1

As #AnonSubmitter85 suggested, the best thing you can do is to convert your month names to numeric values from 1 (January) to 12 (December) as follows:
c = {
7 1 'February';
1 0 'April';
2 1 'December';
2 1 'January';
5 1 'January';
};
t = cell2table(c,'VariableNames',{'ColumnA' 'ColumnB' 'ColumnC'});
t.ColumnC = month(datenum(t.ColumnC,'mmmm'));
This will facilitate the access to a standard sorting criterion for your ColumnC too (in this example, ascending):
t = sortrows(t,{'ColumnA' 'ColumnB' 'ColumnC'},{'ascend', 'ascend', 'ascend'});
If, for any reason that is unknown to us, you are forced to keep your months as literals, you can use a workaround that consists in sorting a clone of the table using the approach described above, and then applying to it the resulting indices:
c = {
7 1 'February';
1 0 'April';
2 1 'December';
2 1 'January';
5 1 'January';
};
t_original = cell2table(c,'VariableNames',{'ColumnA' 'ColumnB' 'ColumnC'});
t_clone = t_original;
t_clone.ColumnC = month(datenum(t_clone.ColumnC,'mmmm'));
[~,idx] = sortrows(t_clone,{'ColumnA' 'ColumnB' 'ColumnC'},{'ascend', 'ascend', 'ascend'});
t_original = t_original(idx,:);