java - How to determine day of week by passing specific date?

Question

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 1

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