dpointer
Monday, June 21, 2004
Doomsday
Given a date, how to know whether it's on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and so on? Enter Doomsday algorithm, from John Horton Conway. For a good explanation of this simple yet powerful algorithm, see http://rudy.ca/doomsday.html. Translating into quick-and-dirty C code, which is adopted from Richard Bowen's Date::DayOfWeek, it would be like the code fragment presented below. Note that isleapyear is only a helper function but could be useful nonetheless.
/* return non-zero if year is a leap year */ int isleapyear( int year ) { if( !(year % 400 ) ) return 1; if( !(year % 100 ) ) return 0; if( !(year % 4 ) ) return 1; return 0; } /* get day of the week (0=sunday) of any date */ /* doomsday algorithm: http://rudy.ca/doomsday.html */ int dayofweek( int day, int month, int year ) { int doomsday, century, count; int ddcentury[] = { 3, 2, 0, 5 }; int ddmonth[] = { 31, 28, 7, 4, 9, 6, 11, 8, 5, 10, 7, 12 }; century = year - (year % 100); doomsday = ddcentury[ ( ( century - 1500 ) / 100 ) % 4 ]; doomsday += (int)( (year-century) / 12 ); doomsday += ( year - century ) % 12; doomsday += (int)( ( ( year - century ) % 12 ) / 4 ); count = day - ddmonth[ month-1 ]; if( ( month < 3 ) && isleapyear( year ) ) count++; count = ( doomsday + count ) % 7; if( count < 0 ) count += 7; return count; }