C Program to find day of week given date

Question

Is there a way to find out day of the week given date in just one line of C code?

For example

Given 19-05-2011(dd-mm-yyyy) gives me Thursday

Answer 1

As reported also by Wikipedia, in 1990 Michael Keith and Tom Craver published an expression to minimise the number of keystrokes needed to enter a self-contained function for converting a Gregorian date into a numerical day of the week.

The expression does preserve neither y nor d, and returns a zero-based index representing the day, starting with Sunday, i.e. if the day is Monday the expression returns 1.

A code example which uses the expression follows:

int d    = 15   ; //Day     1-31
int m    = 5    ; //Month   1-12`
int y    = 2013 ; //Year    2013` 

int weekday  = (d += m < 3 ? y-- : y - 2, 23*m/9 + d + 4 + y/4- y/100 + y/400)%7;  

The expression uses the comma operator, as discussed in this answer.

Enjoy! ;-)

Answer 2

A one-liner is unlikely, but the strptime function can be used to parse your date format and the struct tm argument can be queried for its tm_wday member on systems that modify those fields automatically (e.g. some glibc implementations).

int get_weekday(char * str) {
  struct tm tm;
  memset((void *) &tm, 0, sizeof(tm));
  if (strptime(str, "%d-%m-%Y", &tm) != NULL) {
    time_t t = mktime(&tm);
    if (t >= 0) {
      return localtime(&t)->tm_wday; // Sunday=0, Monday=1, etc.
    }
  }
  return -1;
}

Or you could encode these rules to do some arithmetic in a really long single line:

• 1 Jan 1900 was a Monday.
• Thirty days has September, April, June and November; all the rest have thirty-one, saving February alone, which has twenty-eight, rain or shine, and on leap years, twenty-nine.
• A leap year occurs on any year evenly divisible by 4, but not on a century unless it is divisible by 400.

EDIT: note that this solution only works for dates after the UNIX epoch (1970-01-01T00:00:00Z).