Finding weekend days based on culture

Question

Is there a way to find the days that constitute a weekend or workweek based on different cultures using the .NET framework? For example, some Muslim countries have a workweek from Sunday through Thursday.

Metrify

I think that .net framework does not support this feature. You have to implement with your own model. – Purpose

A similar was question was asked if .NET already supports this. The answer is that it does not; you'll have to roll your own. – Sesquicarbonate

Answer 1

No one had a solution for this so I wrote one. This uses the country to determine if a day is a workday, weekend, or 1/2 workday (Saturday in some countries). There is some ambiguity in this as in Mexico a 1/2 day on Saturday is "customary" but not official. For cases like this, I set it as work time.

This covers everything except 3 provinces in Malaysia, which are different from the rest of Malaysia. AFAIK, CultureInfo.Name does not have a distinct value for those 3 provinces. Most interesting country, Brunei where the weekend is Friday & Sunday, with Saturday a workday.

Code is downloadable as a project at Is it the weekend? Main code below:

using System;
using System.Globalization;

namespace windward
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Extensions for the CultureInfo class.
    /// </summary>
    public static class CultureInfoExtensions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The weekday/weekend state for a given day.
        /// </summary>
        public enum WeekdayState
        {
            /// <summary>
            /// A work day.
            /// </summary>
            Workday,
            /// <summary>
            /// A weekend.
            /// </summary>
            Weekend,
            /// <summary>
            /// Morning is a workday, afternoon is the start of the weekend.
            /// </summary>
            WorkdayMorning
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Returns the English version of the country name. Extracted from the CultureInfo.EnglishName.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="ci">The CultureInfo this object.</param>
        /// <returns>The English version of the country name.</returns>
        public static string GetCountryEnglishName(this CultureInfo ci)
        {
            string[] parts = ci.EnglishName.Split(new[] {'(', ')'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
            if (parts.Length < 2)
                return ci.EnglishName;
            parts = parts[1].Split(new[] {','}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
            return parts[parts.Length - 1].Trim();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Returns the English version of the language name. Extracted from the CultureInfo.EnglishName.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="ci">The CultureInfo this object.</param>
        /// <returns>The English version of the language name.</returns>
        public static string GetLanguageEnglishName(this CultureInfo ci)
        {
            string[] parts = ci.EnglishName.Split(new[] {'('}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
            return parts[0].Trim();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Return if the passed in day of the week is a weekend.
        /// 
        /// note: state pulled from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="ci">The CultureInfo this object.</param>
        /// <param name="day">The Day of the week to return the stat of.</param>
        /// <returns>The weekday/weekend state of the passed in day of the week.</returns>
        public static WeekdayState IsWeekend(this CultureInfo ci, DayOfWeek day)
        {
            string[] items = ci.Name.Split(new[] {'-'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
            switch (items[items.Length - 1])
            {
                case "DZ": // Algeria
                case "BH": // Bahrain
                case "BD": // Bangladesh
                case "EG": // Egypt
                case "IQ": // Iraq
                case "IL": // Israel
                case "JO": // Jordan
                case "KW": // Kuwait
                case "LY": // Libya
                // Northern Malaysia (only in the states of Kelantan, Terengganu, and Kedah)
                case "MV": // Maldives
                case "MR": // Mauritania
                case "NP": // Nepal
                case "OM": // Oman
                case "QA": // Qatar
                case "SA": // Saudi Arabia
                case "SD": // Sudan
                case "SY": // Syria
                case "AE": // U.A.E.
                case "YE": // Yemen
                    return day == DayOfWeek.Thursday || day == DayOfWeek.Friday
                        ? WeekdayState.Weekend
                        : WeekdayState.Workday;

                case "AF": // Afghanistan
                case "IR": // Iran
                    if (day == DayOfWeek.Thursday)
                        return WeekdayState.WorkdayMorning;
                    return day == DayOfWeek.Friday ? WeekdayState.Weekend : WeekdayState.Workday;

                case "BN": // Brunei Darussalam
                    return day == DayOfWeek.Friday || day == DayOfWeek.Sunday
                        ? WeekdayState.Weekend
                        : WeekdayState.Workday;

                case "MX": // Mexico
                case "TH": // Thailand
                    if (day == DayOfWeek.Saturday)
                        return WeekdayState.WorkdayMorning;
                    return day == DayOfWeek.Saturday || day == DayOfWeek.Sunday
                        ? WeekdayState.Weekend
                        : WeekdayState.Workday;

            }

            // most common Saturday/Sunday
            return day == DayOfWeek.Saturday || day == DayOfWeek.Sunday ? WeekdayState.Weekend : WeekdayState.Workday;
        }
    }
}

Supernumerary

so this is better? default: throw new NotImplementedException(); ,or // most common Saturday/Sunday return day == DayOfWeek.Saturday || day == DayOfWeek.Sunday ? WeekdayState.Weekend : WeekdayState.Workday; because it's common? i mean how common it is – Stratocumulus

Answer 2

The only thing i know is how to get the day the week starts. Perhaps this can help:

CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.FirstDayOfWeek

from System.Globalization, perhaps you find in this package something.

There are several Calendar-Classses like JulianCalendar, HebrewCalendar and so on. It could be possible to find there what you want.

Indefeasible

this wont help, as it doesn't says if this culture have two day as weekend or one day – Stratocumulus

Answer 3

I won't give you a .NET answer, but I will say that you won't base it on "culture", but rather on country.

You can get country from IP with a fir degree of accuracy (but it will never be 100%). After that, I would suggest a lot of googling, because I doubt that you are going to find the code already written.

(you might also look into some open source calendar/appointment programs, especially widely-used ones, like on Linux, or maybe Lightning, the Thunderbird plug-in. If you wade through their code, you might find the data for this)

Fortunately, though, you just face a grind, rather than something difficult to implement.

Good luck!

Einsteinium

Answer 4

found the question interesting - did not have an answer myself.. but located an interesting resource - also discussing calendars.

Calendar converter

Endolymph

Answer 5

The below code will work till the time last 2 days are considered as weekends in cultures.

:)

/// <summary>
/// Returns true if the specified date is weekend in given culture
/// is in. 
/// </summary>
public static bool IsItWeekend(DateTime currentDay, CultureInfo cultureInfo)
{
    bool isItWeekend = false;

    DayOfWeek firstDay = cultureInfo.DateTimeFormat.FirstDayOfWeek;

    DayOfWeek currentDayInProvidedDatetime = currentDay.DayOfWeek;

    DayOfWeek lastDayOfWeek = firstDay + 4;

    if (currentDayInProvidedDatetime == lastDayOfWeek + 1 || currentDayInProvidedDatetime == lastDayOfWeek + 2)
        isItWeekend = true;

    return isItWeekend;         
}

Amit Tonk

Dogfish