How to determine day of week by passing specific date?

java date
evilReiko picture evilReiko · Mar 11, 2011 · Viewed 488.8k times · Source

For Example I have the date: "23/2/2010" (23th Feb 2010). I want to pass it to a function which would return the day of week. How can I do this?

In this example, the function should return String "Tue".

Additionally, if just the day ordinal is desired, how can that be retrieved?

Answer

Bozho picture Bozho · Mar 11, 2011

Yes. Depending on your exact case:

  • You can use java.util.Calendar:

    Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
c.setTime(yourDate);
int dayOfWeek = c.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);

  • if you need the output to be Tue rather than 3 (Days of week are indexed starting at 1 for Sunday, see Calendar.SUNDAY), instead of going through a calendar, just reformat the string: new SimpleDateFormat("EE").format(date) (EE meaning "day of week, short version")

  • if you have your input as string, rather than Date, you should use SimpleDateFormat to parse it: new SimpleDateFormat("dd/M/yyyy").parse(dateString)

  • you can use joda-time's DateTime and call dateTime.dayOfWeek() and/or DateTimeFormat.

  • edit: since Java 8 you can now use java.time package instead of joda-time

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