Calculating total days minus weekend - algorithm

Question

I have a requirement to obtain number of days passed since creation date. This number would need to minus the weekends. I have only some functions : JulianDay, JulianWeek, JulianYear to get Julian date values, I also have Today which returns the date of today, time stamp which returns date and time. I have manage to get the difference of today-creation date by using: JulianDay(today)-JulianDay(creation date) but I still can't wrap my head around subtracting the weekends

Answer 1

Not completely sure what the functions you cited in your question do, however, you seem to be comfortable with
doing the basic date arithmetic to determine the number of days between two given dates. The hard part seems
to be figuring out how may days to subtract for weekends.
I think you can accomplish this with two functions:
Given two dates, return the number of days between them. Call this DAYS(date-1, date-2)
Given a date, return the day of the week (where 1 = Monday ... 7 = Sunday). Call this DAY-OF-WEEK(date)
Having these functions you can then do the following:
Calculate full weeks in the date range: WEEKS = DAYS(date-1, date2) mod 7
Calculate days not parts of full weeks: DAYS-LEFT = DAYS(date-1, date-2) - (WEEKS * 7)
Determine which day of the week the last day falls on: LAST-DAY = DAY-OF-WEEK(date-2)
Adjust the number of DAYS-LEFT from the partial week as follows:
if DAYS-LEFT > 0 then
case LAST-DAY
when 6 then /* Saturday */
DAYS-LEFT = DAYS-LEFT - 1
when 7 then /* Sunday */
if DAYS-LEFT = 1 then
DAYS-LEFT = 0
else
DAYS-LEFT = DAYS-LEFT - 2
end-if
when other /* Monday through Friday */
case DAYS-LEFT - LAST-DAY
when > 1 then
DAYS-LEFT = DAYS-LEFT - 2
when = 1 then
DAYS-LEFT = DAYS-LEFT - 1
when other
DAYS-LEFT = DAYS-LEFT /* no adjustment */
end-case
end-case
end-if
DAYS-EXCLUDING-WEEKENDS = DAYS(date-1, date-2) - (WEEKS * 2) + DAYS-LEFT
I assume you have, or can build, a DAYS(date-1, date-2) function. The next bit is to determine what day of the week
a given date falls on. The algorithm to do this is called Zeller's congruence. I won't
repeat the algorithm here since Wikipedia does a fine job of describing it.
Hope this gets you on your way...

Answer 2

Your JulianDay(y,m,d) function returns a serial number for each date; let's say for the sake of discussion that JulianDay(2013,7,4) returns 2456478. The next day will be 2456479, then 2456480, and so on. And let's say that the difference of two days is diff.
The number of full weeks in diff, each containing 5 weekdays, is diff // 7 (that's integer division, so it rounds down). Thus if diff is 25, there will be 25 // 7 = 3 full weeks plus an extra diff % 7 = 4 days. The 3 full weeks contain 15 weekdays; it doesn't matter which day of the week you start from. So you only need to consider the 4 extra days to see how may are weekdays.
The number that the JulianDay function returns can be taken modulo 7 to calculate the day of the week; on my JulianDay function, modulo 5 represents Saturday and modulo 6 represents Sunday. You can take the 4 extra days to be either the 4 days at the beginning of the period or the 4 days at the end; it doesn't matter because all the other days are part of a period of consecutive full weeks that each have 5 weekdays. Say you pick the first 4 days. Then take the JulianDay of the first day modulo 7, then the JulianDay of the first day plus 1 modulo 7, then the JulianDay of the first day plus 2 modulo 7, then the JulianDay of the first day plus 3 modulo 7, determine how many of them are weekdays, and add that to the number of weekdays in full weeks.
All you need is a JulianDay function.

Answer 3

This code should do what you want:
Date fromDate = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis()-(30L*24*60*60*1000)); // 30 days ago
Date toDate = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis()); // now
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.setTime(fromDate);
int countDays = 0;
while (toDate.compareTo(cal.getTime()) > 0) {
if (cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) != Calendar.SATURDAY && cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) != Calendar.SUNDAY)
countDays++;
cal.add(Calendar.DATE, 1);
}
System.out.println(countDays);