CDate Class - handle date manipulation simply

Hello,

I just noticed a few people having problems with dates and thought someone might find a class I wrote to be useful. It is called CDate. It can:
- automatically retrieve the current system date
- set the date using numeric month, day, year
- set the date using a user defined string format
- increment/decrement a date by any number of days
- compare dates with the relational operators (<=>, ==, !=)
- find the difference between two dates
- format a date into a user-defined string (including usage of the month names in user-defined case and length)
- do all the above with complete accuracy taking in leap years, etc

Download it and let me know what you think. It's in the attached zip.

Here are some examples:

Code:

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  CDate date; // retrieves current date
  date += 28; // set date to 28 Days Later
 
  const char *today = "20030715";

  if (date != CDate(today)) {
    cout << date.Format("Mmmmmmmmm DD, YYYY") << " is not today!\n";   
    cout << "There are " << (date - CDate(today)) << " days between " <<
      date.Format("MM/DD/YY") << " and " << CDate(today).Format("mm/dd/yy\n");
  }
 
  cout << "\nToday is: " << (const char*)CDate() << endl;
 
  cout << "Or more nicely put, today is: " << CDate().Format("Mmm DD, yyyy\n");

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That will output this:

Quote:

---

August 12, 2003 is not today!
There are 28 days between 08/12/03 and 07/15/03

Today is: 20030715
Or more nicely put, today is: Jul 15, 2003

---

Nice useful class, thanks.

Boost has a date/time class now.
For future reference date/time classes are easier to build if you do calculations based upon the julian date. This makes things easy for both dates in the Julian calender and dates in the Gregorian calender.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Stoned_Coder
For future reference date/time classes are easier to build if you do calculations based upon the julian date. This makes things easy for both dates in the Julian calender and dates in the Gregorian calender.

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:sigh:
Dates are so ridiculously complex... to think, we could fix all that by simply shortening the metre a bit.

Where do you put the header file in your C++ directory?

This looks like it would help tons with the new project I am working on.

_Elixia_: Thanks.

TheShaggmeister: You can put the header anywhere you would normally put a header. The simplest place is in the same directory as your program source or in a subdirectory of it. I personally have a special directory where I put my libraries and just point my compilers at it.

Stoned_coder: While it's true that it would be easier for manipulating dates, my original intent was to create a class similar to the way dates work in the language I use at work. Thanks for the tip, in any case.

If anyone is curious, the way it works is by storing the date as the number of days after Dec 31 of the year 1 BC. So, for example, the date Jan 1, 0000 would be stored as "1".