Question

Given a String that is simply a day, for example, “Thu” or “Thursday”, how would I get a java.util.Calendar object where the day String represents the closest String to today. In other words, today is Monday, 3/26/29012, so if the String were “Thu”, I would want to form a date that represents “3/29/2012”. If the String passed in is “Mon” and we’re on Monday, I would want today’s date. In this example, “3/26/2012”.

I tried this …

            final DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE");
            java.util.Date date = (Date) formatter.parse(dayOfWeekStr);
            final Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();
            dateCal.set(Calendar.YEAR, now.get(Calendar.YEAR));
            dateCal.set(Calendar.MONTH, now.get(Calendar.MONTH));
            dateCal.setTime(date);  

but it isn’t working. Once I set the date, the year and month results to 1970, January.

Answer 1

I ended up going with

public static Calendar getNearestDateFromDayString(final String dayOfWeekStr,
        final Calendar startingDay) throws ParseException {
    final DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE");
    final java.util.Date date = (Date) formatter.parse(dayOfWeekStr);
    final Calendar result = Calendar.getInstance();
    result.setTime(date);
    result.set(Calendar.YEAR, startingDay.get(Calendar.YEAR));
    result.set(Calendar.MONTH, startingDay.get(Calendar.MONTH));
    result.set(Calendar.HOUR, startingDay.get(Calendar.HOUR));
    result.set(Calendar.MINUTE, startingDay.get(Calendar.MINUTE));
    result.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
    java.util.Date today = new java.util.Date();
    while (result.getTimeInMillis() <= today.getTime()) { 
        result.add(Calendar.DATE, 7);
    }   // while
    return result;
} // getNearestDateFromDayString

If anyone has a more concise solution, I’ll accept that instead.