How to calculate next, previous business day in Rails?

Question

How to calculate next and previous business days in Rails?

Answer 1

Here's two examples for the number of working days between two dates:

1. http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/1209
   • Also at: http://www.railsonwave.com/2007/1/30/calculate-the-number-of-working-days-between-two-dates
2. http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/93938#190402

Here's a Ruby holidays gem:

• http://github.com/alexdunae/holidays
  • Also at: http://code.dunae.ca/holidays/

Answer 2

If you are running on rails, You could create a config/initializers/date_time.rb

class DateTime
  def next_business_day
      # if its a friday saturday or sunday
    if self.day > 4

      # calculate the remaining days to add to the current day
      remaining_days = 7 - self.day + 1

      return remaining_days.days.from_now
    else

      # return tomorrow
      return self.tomorrow
    end
  end
end

usage:

a = DateTime.now
a.next_business_day
=> Mon, 08 Jun 2020 13:46:13 UTC +00:00

Answer 3

This is a method I use in my production scheduling script:

require 'date'
def shift_business_days(date, incr)
  date = Date.parse(date.to_s)
  incr.abs.times do
    date += (incr < 0 ? -1 : 1)
    while date.saturday? || date.sunday? do
      date += (incr < 0 ? -1 : 1)
    end
  end
  date
end

It takes a date and a positive or negative integer incr as arguments, and increments or decrements the date by incr days, skipping weekends. This has the added benefit of being able handle a Date/Time object or any date string that Date.parse can handle. For example:

# (today is 2019-03-08)
shift_business_days(Time.now, 2)
##=> #<Date: 2019-03-12 ((2458555j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

shift_business_days('5/20', -10)
##=> #<Date: 2019-05-06 ((2458610j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

Answer 4

date = Date.today
date.next_weekday
date.prev_weekday

Answer 5

Well, you can use something like yesterday = 1.days.ago to get yesterday's date. Use yesterday.strftime('%w') to get the day of the week as a integer (0=Sunday, 6=Saturday). If yesterday is 0 (Sunday), then the previous day of the week would be 3.days.ago ... you get the idea.

And you can use tomorrow = 1.days.since to get tomorrow's date.

Answer 6

I realise that this is an old thread, but I just had to work this one out for myself and I was looking for a very short bit of code that was trivial to modify if a business had weird opening days (like "closed Sunday/Monday").

def next_business_day(from_day)
  workdays = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
  test_day = from_day + 1.day
  return workdays.include?(test_day.wday) ? test_day : next_business_day(test_day)
end

I suppose it could be shortened again to something like this, but I think it becomes less obvious

def next_business_day(from_day)
  test_day = from_day + 1.day
  [1,2,3,4,5,6].include?(test_day.wday) ? test_day : next_business_day(test_day)
end