Question

I am trying to find out weekdays using DateFormatSymbols and here is a short programe

String[] shortWeekdays = new DateFormatSymbols().getShortWeekdays();
        System.out.println(shortWeekdays.length);

        for (int i = 0; i < shortWeekdays.length; i++) {
            String shortWeekday = shortWeekdays[i];
            System.out.println("shortWeekday = " + shortWeekday);
        }

and it is giving me folloiwng output

• shortWeekday =
• shortWeekday = Sun
• shortWeekday = Mon
• shortWeekday = Tue
• shortWeekday = Wed
• shortWeekday = Thu
• shortWeekday = Fri
• shortWeekday = Sat

i am not sure why its giving total length as 8 while it should give it as 7

Answer 1

The range of values for Calendar.{SUNDAY, MONDAY, ... SUNDAY } is 1-7. The docs for getShortWeekDays() state:

Returns: the short weekday strings. Use Calendar.SUNDAY, Calendar.MONDAY, etc. to index the result array.

So I’d expect an array which can be indexed with values 1-7… which means it has to have 8 elements (as all arrays in Java are 0-based).