Question

OK so for example, today is Tuesday, Feb 02. Well the equivalent “Tuesday” from last year was on Feb 03.

How can I find this out programmatically?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Just my two cents. I don’t like the idea, that the second answer assumes 52 weeks in a year, it will work for a single year, but is a solution to only this exact problem – eg. if you want to check the same thing moving back 10 years it won’t work. I’d do it like this:

var today:Date = new Date();    
// Here we store the day of the week            
var currentDay:int = today.day;
trace (today);      
const milisecondsInADay:uint = 1000*60*60*24;
// Here we move back a year, but we can just as well move back 10 years
// or 2 months      
today.fullYear -= 1;
// Find the closest date that is the same day of the week as current day
today.time -= milisecondsInADay*(today.day-currentDay);     
trace (today);

returns:

Tue Feb 2 21:13:18 GMT+0100 2010 
Tue Feb 3 21:13:18 GMT+0100 2009