Function to return date of Easter for the given year

calendar, computus, datetime, language-agnostic

Solution

in SQL Server Easter Sunday would look like this, scroll down for Good Friday

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.GetEasterSunday 
( @Y INT ) 
RETURNS SMALLDATETIME 
AS 
BEGIN 
    DECLARE     @EpactCalc INT,  
        @PaschalDaysCalc INT, 
        @NumOfDaysToSunday INT, 
        @EasterMonth INT, 
        @EasterDay INT 

    SET @EpactCalc = (24 + 19 * (@Y % 19)) % 30 
    SET @PaschalDaysCalc = @EpactCalc - (@EpactCalc / 28) 
    SET @NumOfDaysToSunday = @PaschalDaysCalc - ( 
        (@Y + @Y / 4 + @PaschalDaysCalc - 13) % 7 
    ) 

    SET @EasterMonth = 3 + (@NumOfDaysToSunday + 40) / 44 

    SET @EasterDay = @NumOfDaysToSunday + 28 - ( 
        31 * (@EasterMonth / 4) 
    ) 

    RETURN 
    ( 
        SELECT CONVERT 
        (  SMALLDATETIME, 
                 RTRIM(@Y)  
            + RIGHT('0'+RTRIM(@EasterMonth), 2)  
            + RIGHT('0'+RTRIM(@EasterDay), 2)  
        ) 
    ) 

END 
GO

Good Friday is like this and it uses the Easter function above

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.GetGoodFriday 
( 
    @Y INT 
) 
RETURNS SMALLDATETIME 
AS 
BEGIN 
    RETURN (SELECT dbo.GetEasterSunday(@Y) - 2) 
END 
GO

From here: http://web.archive.org/web/20070611150639/http://sqlserver2000.databases.aspfaq.com/why-should-i-consider-using-an-auxiliary-calendar-table.html

Problem

So, here's a funny little programming challenge. I was writing a quick method to determine all the market holidays for a particular year, and then I started reading about Easter and discovered just how crazy* the logic is for determining its date--the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon following the spring equinox! Does anybody know of an existing function to calculate the date of Easter for a given year? Granted, it's probably not all that hard to do; I just figured I'd ask in case somebody's already done this. (And that seems very likely.) UPDATE: Actually, I'm really looking for the date of Good Friday (the Friday before Easter)... I just figured Easter would get me there. And since I'm in the U.S., I assume I'm looking for the Catholic Easter? But perhaps someone can correct me on that if I'm wrong. *By "crazy" I meant, like, involved. Not anything offensive...

Original source