HOWTO · Java

How to Get Day of Week in Java

This tutorial demonstrates how to get the day of the week in Java.

By Sheeraz GulPublished 2022-09-22Updated 2024-02-02

This tutorial demonstrates how to get the day of the Week in Java.

Java Get Day of Week

Sometimes there is a requirement to get the day of a week while working with UI. This can be achieved in Java with the following two methods:

  1. From Java 7, the legacy Calendar class can be used, which defines the constants from SUNDAY (1) to SATURDAY (7). We can get the day using the method calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) on the instance of the calendar.
  2. From Java 8, the legacy API Date can be used to get the day of a week from Monday (1) to SUNDAY (7). The method LocalDate.getDayOfWeek() can be used to get the day of the week.

Get the Day of the Week Using Java 7 Calendar Class

The Java 7 Calendar class is used to get the day of the week. For that, we need to use java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar.

Follow the steps below:

  • Create an instance of the Calendar class.
  • Set the date in calendar using the setTime(new Date()) method, which will set the current date.
  • Now use get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) on the calendar instance to get the day’s number of the week.
  • We need to use the SimpleDateFormat() Class to get the name of the day.

Let’s implement the above example in Java:

package delftstack;

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;

public class Example {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Calendar Demo_Calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
    Demo_Calendar.setTime(new Date());

    int Day_Number = Demo_Calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);

    DateFormat Date_Formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEEE");
    String Day_Name = Date_Formatter.format(Demo_Calendar.getTime());

    System.out.println("The current day of the Week in number is :: " + Day_Number);
    System.out.println("The current day of the Week in Text is :: " + Day_Name);
  }
}

The code above will show the day of the week for the current date in number and text. See output:

The current day of the Week in number is :: 5
The current day of the Week in Text is :: Thursday

Get the Day of the Week Using Java 8 Date API

To get the day of the week using Java 8 API, we need to use the LocalDate class and DayofWeek enum from the Time package of Java. Follow the steps to get the day of the week using Java 8:

  • Create an instance of LocalDate with the method now(), which will be the current date.
  • Use the DayofWeek enum and the getDayOfWeek() method on the instance of LocalDate to get the current day of the week.
  • Use the getValue() method on DayofWeek to get the day in number.
  • Use the getDisplayName() method on DayofWeek to show the name of the day in full and short formats.

Let’s try to implement the above example in Java:

package delftstack;

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.time.DayOfWeek;
import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.format.TextStyle;
import java.util.Locale;

public class Example {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    LocalDate Current_Date = LocalDate.now();

    DayOfWeek Week_Day = Current_Date.getDayOfWeek();

    System.out.println("The current day of the Week is :: " + Week_Day);
    System.out.println("The current day of the Week in Number is :: " + Week_Day.getValue());
    System.out.println("The current day of the Week in full format is :: "
        + Week_Day.getDisplayName(TextStyle.FULL, Locale.getDefault()));
    System.out.println("The current day of the Week in short format is :: "
        + Week_Day.getDisplayName(TextStyle.SHORT, Locale.getDefault()));
  }
}

The code above will get the day of the current date and convert it to number, full, and short formats. See output:

The current day of the Week is :: THURSDAY
The current day of the Week in Number is :: 4
The current day of the Week in full format is :: Thursday
The current day of the Week in short format is :: Thu

About the author

Sheeraz Gul

Sheeraz is a Doctorate fellow in Computer Science at Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xian, China. He has 7 years of Software Development experience in AI, Web, Database, and Desktop technologies. He writes tutorials in Java, PHP, Python, GoLang, R, etc., to help beginners learn the field of Computer Science.

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