Boost C++ Libraries: Ticket #4718: date::day_of_week documentation is unhelpful

viboes — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:03:25 GMT

It returns

! An enumeration of weekday names enum weekdays {Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday};

defined in date_defs/hpp.

I agree the documentation can be improved.

owner, component changed

Steven Watanabe — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:44:19 GMT

owner changed from Matias Capeletto to az_sw_dude
component Documentation → date_time

anonymous — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:45:49 GMT

The whole boost.date_time documentation is an horrible mess. It should be entirely rewritten from scratch.

anonymous — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:18:05 GMT

In fact, I have to sadly agree to the last comment. The documentation is impossible to understand. It took me 1h at work to figure out what was the result of day_of_week() !!!!! How can we help ?

TCN — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:09:22 GMT

Documentation should have an example like this (tested with boost 1.45.0):

#include <iostream>
#include <boost/date_time/gregorian/gregorian.hpp>
using namespace boost::gregorian;
using namespace std;
...
// Inside main() or some other function
date d(2012, Apr, 19);
cout << "Date : " << d << endl;
greg_weekday wd(d.day_of_week());
greg_day_of_year_rep yd(d.day_of_year());
cout << "Day of week : " << wd                          // or wd.as_short_string()
     << " (full name : " << wd.as_long_string() << ")"  // returns a char*, as above
     << " (as number : " << wd.as_number() << ")"       // returns an unsigned short
     << endl;
cout << "Day of year : " << yd << endl;                 // returns an unsigned short

And/or it should point the user to greg_weekday.hpp, greg_day_of_year.hpp

(Naming inconsistencies, yuck!)