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

Question

Is there a good way to get the date of the coming Wednesday? That is, if today is Tuesday, I want to get the date of Wednesday in this week; if today is Wednesday, I want to get the date of next Wednesday; if today is Thursday, I want to get the date of Wednesday in the following week.

Thanks.

Answer 1

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