Finding the Day of Week for a Date in Java

Learn to find the day of the week for a given date using the legacy Date and Calendar classes as well as the new Java 8 Date API.

1. Overview

There may be a requirement to show the day of the week (Monday to Sunday) in the UI, and then we need to find this information.

• With Java 8 Date API, we have a dedicated enum DayOfWeek starting from Monday (1) to SUNDAY (7). We can use the LocalDate.getDayOfWeek() method to the day value.
• In Java, legacy Calendar class defines the 7 constants from SUNDAY (1) to SATURDAY(7). We can a day from Calendar instance using the cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) method.

It is crucial to notice the difference in the numbers assigned to weekdays in both solutions.

2. Get the Day of Week using LocalDate (Java 8)

Let us see a program to demonstrate how to get the day of the week using LocalDate class and DayOfWeek enum since Java 8.

LocalDate today = LocalDate.now();

DayOfWeek dayOfWeek = today.getDayOfWeek();

System.out.println("Day of the Week :: " + dayOfWeek);
System.out.println("Day of the Week - in Number :: "
    + dayOfWeek.getValue());
System.out.println("Day of the Week - Formatted FULL :: "
    + dayOfWeek.getDisplayName(TextStyle.FULL, Locale.getDefault()));
System.out.println("Day of the Week - Formatted SHORT :: "
    + dayOfWeek.getDisplayName(TextStyle.SHORT, Locale.getDefault()));

Program output.

Day of the Week :: TUESDAY
Day of the Week - in Number :: 2
Day of the Week - Formatted FULL :: Tuesday
Day of the Week - Formatted SHORT :: Tue

3. Get the Day of Week using Calendar (Java 7)

Now let us find the day of the week using the legacy Java classes java.util.Date and Calendar.

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.setTime(new Date());

int dayOfWeekNum = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);

DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEEE");
String dayOfWeekString = formatter.format(cal.getTime());

System.out.println("Day of the Week - in Number :: " + dayOfWeekNum);
System.out.println("Day of the Week - in Text :: " + dayOfWeekString);

Program output.

Day of the Week - in Number :: 3
Day of the Week - in Text :: Tuesday

4. Conclusion

Clearly, old Java classes had minimal support for getting the name of weekdays. Since Java 8, new date-time APIs have solid support and even a dedicated enum for this purpose.

Happy Learning !!

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