Is there a good way to get the date of the coming Wednesday?

calendar, date, java

Solution

The basic algorithm is the following:

- Get the current date

- Get its day of week

- Find its difference with Wednesday

- If the difference is not positive, add 7 (i.e. insist on next coming/future date)

- Add the difference

Here's a snippet to show how to do this with `java.util.Calendar`:

import java.util.Calendar;

public class NextWednesday {
    public static Calendar nextDayOfWeek(int dow) {
        Calendar date = Calendar.getInstance();
        int diff = dow - date.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);
        if (diff <= 0) {
            diff += 7;
        }
        date.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, diff);
        return date;
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.printf(
            "%ta, %<tb %<te, %<tY",
            nextDayOfWeek(Calendar.WEDNESDAY)
        );
    }
}

Relative to my here and now, the output of the above snippet is `"Wed, Aug 18, 2010"`.

API links

- `java.util.Calendar`

- `java.util.Formatter` - for the formatting string syntax

Problem

Original source