Java Get All Working Days in a year in YYYYMMDD format

Question

My Sunday challenge is to get and persist working days in a particular year to a CSV, etc file.

I have following code and the problem I am facing is : how to print dates in a specific format i.e. YYYYMMDD as the code currently prints something like Sat Jan 19 00:00:00 CET 2019.

Also, if I can exclude week-ends and generally if there is a better way to write a much shorter code in Java 8.

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

public class DatesInYear
{

    public static SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd");

    public static void main (String[] args) throws java.lang.Exception
    {

        Date dt = new Date();
        System.out.println(dt);

        List<Date> dates = printDates("20190101","20191231");


        Collections.reverse(dates);
        System.out.println(dates.size());
        for(Date date:dates)
        {
            SimpleDateFormat format1 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd");
            System.out.println(format1.format(date));

        }
    }
    public static List<Date> printDates(String fromDate, String toDate)
    {
        ArrayList<Date> dates = new ArrayList<Date>();

        try {

            Calendar fromCal = Calendar.getInstance();
            fromCal.setTime(dateFormat .parse(fromDate));

            Calendar toCal = Calendar.getInstance();
            toCal.setTime(dateFormat .parse(toDate));

            while(!fromCal.after(toCal))
            {
                dates.add(fromCal.getTime());
                fromCal.add(Calendar.DATE, 1);
            }


        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println(e);
        }
        return dates;
    }
}

Answer 1

Since it's 2020, you really should be embracing the java.time.* API.

While I'm sure there's probably a really neat way to get the "working" days between to dates, I've gone for the brute force method...

LocalDate ld = LocalDate.of(2020, Month.JANUARY, 1);
LocalDate endDate = ld.plusYears(1);

// You don't "have" to put into a list, but I like to seperate my
// code responsbilities ;)
List<LocalDate> workDays = new ArrayList<>(365);
System.out.println(endDate);
while (ld.isBefore(endDate)) {
    // This would be a good place for a delegate to determine if we want the specific day
    // as it could then take into account public holidays
    if (ld.getDayOfWeek() == DayOfWeek.SATURDAY || ld.getDayOfWeek() == DayOfWeek.SUNDAY) {
        // NOOP
    } else {
        workDays.add(ld);
    }
    ld = ld.plusDays(1);
}

Then you can simply use a DateTimeFormatter to format the LocalDate into a format that you want, for example...

DateTimeFormatter format = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyyMMdd");
List<String> formats = workDays.stream().map(value -> value.format(format)).collect(Collectors.toList());

for (String value : formats) {
    System.out.println(value);
}

Answer 2

    Set<DayOfWeek> weekend = EnumSet.of(DayOfWeek.SATURDAY, DayOfWeek.SUNDAY);
    LocalDate.of(2019, Month.JANUARY, 1)
             .datesUntil(LocalDate.of(2020, Month.DECEMBER, 31), Period.ofDays(1))
             .filter(x -> !weekend.contains(x.getDayOfWeek()))
             .forEachOrdered(System.out::println);