Counting days excluding weekends

Question

I'm creating a library-style system in Ruby on Rails, and I'm trying to come up with a way to calculate the overdue days while excluding weekends when a borrowed item is returned. Right now I'm just calculating "dayslate" as the difference between the due date and the date the item was actually returned, but I want to exclude weekends, since items can only be returned on weekdays.

This is my first real experience with Ruby and Rails, so my apologies if I'm missing something obvious. Thanks for any help you all can provide.

Here's the code I have for the "return" function:

   def return
     @product = Product.find(params[:id])
     today = Date.today
     dayslate = today - @product.due_date
     if @product.due_date >= today
       @product.borrower = @product.check_out = @product.due_date = @product.extended_checkout = nil
       @product.save!
       flash[:notice] = "Okay, it's checked in!"
       redirect_to(products_url)
     else
       @product.borrower = @product.check_out = @product.due_date = @product.extended_checkout = nil
       @product.save!
       flash[:notice] = "Checked in, but it was #{dayslate} days late!"
       redirect_to(products_url)
     end
 end 

Answer 1

Here's a snippet of code to find the number of weekdays in a Range of Date objects

require 'date'
# Calculate the number of weekdays since 14 days ago
p ( (Date.today - 14)..(Date.today) ).select {|d| (1..5).include?(d.wday) }.size

This is how I would use it in your case.

class Product
  def days_late
    weekdays_in_date_range( self.due_date..(Date.today) )
  end

  protected
  def weekdays_in_date_range(range)
    # You could modify the select block to also check for holidays
    range.select { |d| (1..5).include?(d.wday) }.size
  end
end

Answer 2

sunday, saturday = 0, 6
weekend = [sunday, saturday]
((start_date..end_date).collect(&:wday) - weekend).count

Answer 3

If holidays matter to you (i.e. you don't want to count a day as a weekday if it is a holiday), you might want to look into http://rubyforge.org/projects/holidays/. If you combine the loop that @md5sum mentioned with a check to see if the weekday is a holiday, you may be golden.

Answer 4

Um.. just one more thing which could be useful since it's your first rails experience - pay attention to that business logic in the controller. Your model, that's where it belongs.

Answer 5

You might check out this page and see if you can add a counter into the loop and check against the current date through each iteration.

Answer 6

Regarding @Marini's post it is possible to eliminate the overhead of generating a range of dates:

def weekdays(date1, date2)
  wday = date1.wday
  (0..(date2-date1)).count {|offset| ((wday + offset) % 7 % 6) > 0}
end

% 7 turns each offset into a weekday, and % 6 returns 0 for Saturday (6) or Sunday (0)

Answer 7

calculate week days of the current_month

start_date = Date.today.beginning_of_month
end_date = Date.today.end_of_month

(start_date..end_date).select{|a| a.wday < 6 && a.wday > 0}.count

Answer 8

I think this is simpler and more readable than the accepted answer:

require 'date'
to = Date.parse('2017-02-02')
from = to - 14
(from..to).count { |d| !d.sunday? && !d.saturday? }
#=> 11

Answer 9

I found a faster way to counting weekend days, you can get days count excluding weekends by (start_date..end_date).size - weekend_count:

def weekend_count(start_date, end_date)
  size = (end_date - start_date).to_i
  count = 0
  if start_date.wday != 0
    size -= (7 - start_date.wday).to_i
    count += 1
  end

  left_over  = size % 7
  if left_over == 0
    count = (count / 7) * 2
  else
    size -=  left_over
    count += (size / 7) * 2 + 1
  end
  count
end

Compare with [0, 6].include? date.wday, see my benchmark result:

Distance 10
Optimized result:  4
Normal result:     4
                                                  user     system      total        real
Optimized                                     0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000018)
Normal                                        0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000032)
Distance 100
Optimized result:  29
Normal result:     29
                                                  user     system      total        real
Optimized                                     0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000006)
Normal                                        0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000094)
Distance 1000
Optimized result:  286
Normal result:     286
                                                  user     system      total        real
Optimized                                     0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000010)
Normal                                        0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000650)
Distance 10000
Optimized result:  2858
Normal result:     2858
                                                  user     system      total        real
Optimized                                     0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000013)
Normal                                        0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.004995)
Distance 100000
Optimized result:  28572
Normal result:     28572
                                                  user     system      total        real
Optimized                                     0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000011)
Normal                                        0.060000   0.000000   0.060000 (  0.064223)