Guide to Java DayOfWeek

Learn to determine which day of the week is a given date in Java. The weekdays are considered all 7 days from Sunday, Monday till Saturday.

1. DayOfWeek Enum

DayOfWeek is an enum representing the seven days of the week – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

• As it is an enum, it has ordinal values associated with each day. It is from 1 (Monday) to 7 (Sunday).
• Some locales also assign different numeric values to the days, declaring Sunday to have the value 1, however, this class provides no support for this.
• To get the numeric representation, use of getValue() is recommended.
• This is an immutable and thread-safe enum.

2. Determining DayOfWeek from LocalDate

LocalDate class has method getDayOfWeek() which return the enum value representing that day of the week.

LocalDate today = LocalDate.now();

System.out.println( today.getDayOfWeek() );				// SUNDAY
System.out.println( today.getDayOfWeek().getValue() );	// 7

Similar to LocalDate, other temporal classes also provide this method.

• LocalDate getDayOfWeek()
• LocalDateTime getDayOfWeek()
• ZonedDateTime getDayOfWeek()

3. Localized Display

Use getDisplayName(TextStyle, Locale) to get the value of a day of the week in locale-specific manner.

public static void main(String[] args)
{
	String textValue = getDayString(today, Locale.getDefault());

	System.out.println(textValue);			// Sunday

	textValue = getDayString(today, Locale.GERMAN);

	System.out.println(textValue);			// Sonntag
}

public static String getDayString(LocalDate date, Locale locale)
{
    DayOfWeek day = date.getDayOfWeek();
    return day.getDisplayName(TextStyle.FULL, locale);
}

Happy Learning !!

Sourcecode Download