c++ - Determining the difference between dates

Question

I'm trying to figure out a way for my program to take a date (like February 2nd, 2003) and show the difference between the two with another date (like April 2nd, 2012), excluding leap years. So far I've only been able to figure it out if the dates are in the same month, just by subtracting the "day". In this program I use 2 sets of "month", "day" and "year" integers. I'm pretty much at a loss from where to go from here. This is a completely optional part of my assignment but I'd like to get an idea on how to get it to work. It seems like a hassle to me, but maybe there's a simple math formula I'm not thinking about?

Sorry, I don't have any pre-existing code for this part because the rest of the assignment just deals with having the user enter dates and then adding and subtracting a single day.

Answer 1

Using just the standard library, you can convert a moderately insane date structure into a count of seconds since an arbitrary zero point; then subtract and convert into days:

#include <ctime>

// Make a tm structure representing this date
std::tm make_tm(int year, int month, int day)
{
    std::tm tm = {0};
    tm.tm_year = year - 1900; // years count from 1900
    tm.tm_mon = month - 1;    // months count from January=0
    tm.tm_mday = day;         // days count from 1
    return tm;
}

// Structures representing the two dates
std::tm tm1 = make_tm(2012,4,2);    // April 2nd, 2012
std::tm tm2 = make_tm(2003,2,2);    // February 2nd, 2003

// Arithmetic time values.
// On a posix system, these are seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
std::time_t time1 = std::mktime(&tm1);
std::time_t time2 = std::mktime(&tm2);

// Divide by the number of seconds in a day
const int seconds_per_day = 60*60*24;
std::time_t difference = (time1 - time2) / seconds_per_day;    

// To be fully portable, we shouldn't assume that these are Unix time;
// instead, we should use "difftime" to give the difference in seconds:
double portable_difference = std::difftime(time1, time2) / seconds_per_day;

Using Boost.Date_Time is a little less weird:

#include "boost/date_time/gregorian/gregorian_types.hpp"

using namespace boost::gregorian;
date date1(2012, Apr, 2);
date date2(2003, Feb, 2);
long difference = (date1 - date2).days();

It seems like a hassle to me, but maybe there's a simple math formula I'm not thinking about?

It is indeed a hassle, but there is a formula, if you want to do the calculation yourself.