Is there a better way to determine the NSDate for Memorial Day (the last Monday in May) in a given year?
NSInteger aGivenYear = 2013 ;
NSCalendar* calendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar] ;
NSDateComponents* firstMondayInJuneComponents = [NSDateComponents new] ;
firstMondayInJuneComponents.month = 6 ;
// Thanks, Martin R., for pointing out that `weekOfMonth` is wrong for returning the first Monday in June.
firstMondayInJuneComponents.weekOfMonth = 1 ;
firstMondayInJuneComponents.weekday = 2 ; //Monday
firstMondayInJuneComponents.year = aGivenYear ;
NSDate* firstMondayInJune = [calendar dateFromComponents:firstMondayInJuneComponents] ;
NSDateComponents* subtractAWeekComponents = [NSDateComponents new] ;
subtractAWeekComponents.week = 0 ;
NSDate* memorialDay = [calendar dateByAddingComponents:subtractAWeekComponents toDate:firstMondayInJune options:0] ;
Edit
I see now that firstMondayInJune
in the above example doesn't work for all years; it returns May 28 for the year 2012.
Thanks, Martin R. weekdayOrdinal
does exactly what I hoped, and it returns Memorial Day with 3 fewer lines of code:
NSInteger aGivenYear = 2013 ;
NSDateComponents* memorialDayComponents = [NSDateComponents new] ;
memorialDayComponents.year = aGivenYear ;
memorialDayComponents.month = 5 ;
memorialDayComponents.weekday = 2 ; //Monday
memorialDayComponents.weekdayOrdinal = -1 ; //The last instance of the specified weekday in the specified month & year.
NSDate* memorialDay = [calendar dateFromComponents:memorialDayComponents] ;