As we need to separate the string into three parts, we need to use the strtok function twice. The first time the string is separated into 10 and -Dec-2017 using strtok. Then, the second string is separated into Dec and -2017 using strtok. (As leading delimiters are ignored the second - is found as the delimiter in -Dec-2017.) Finally, we need to remove the - from the string -2017; this can be done by just indexing from the second character to the end of the string. An example of calling this function follows: >> [d, m, y] = separatedate d = 10 m = Dec y = 2017 Note that no input arguments are passed to the separatedate function; instead, the date function returns the current date as a string. Also, note that all three output arguments are strings.