Method to calculate business days - c++

Question

I have an exercice, which I am having a little trouble with.
I must create a calculator which takes two parameters: Start date and days to add (except saturday and sunday, only business days, from monday to friday). Another thing is that the sum has to include the start date.
E.g. let's take the start day July 12th 2016, and add 8 days, which correspond to July 21th 2016 (Saturday and Sunday excluded, and Tuesday, July 21th 2016 is counted as one day).
I hope I'm clear.
I tried to code something, but it is not working.
// rStringGridEd1->IntCells[3][row] is a custom stringgrid
// and correspond to the number of days to add, j is the
// counter for the loop
while (j < rStringGridEd1->IntCells[3][row])
{
if (DayOfWeek(date) != 1 || DayOfWeek(date) !=7)
{
// if current date (TDate date = "12/07/16") is not Saturday or Sunday increment date by one day
date++;
}
else if(DayOfWeek(date) == 1)
{
//If date correspond to sunday increment the date by one and j the counter by one
date=date+1;
j++;
}
else if(DayOfWeek(date) == 7)
{
//If date correspond to saturday increment the date by two days and j the counter by one
date=date+2;
j++;
}
j++;
}
Can anyone help me, please?

Answer 1

Here is what Lee Painton's excellent (and up-voted) answer would look like using this free, open-source C++11/14 date library which is built on top of <chrono>:
#include "date.h"
#include <iostream>
date::year_month_day
get_end_job_date(date::year_month_day start, date::days length)
{
using namespace date;
--length;
auto w = weeks{length / days{5}};
length %= 5;
auto end = sys_days{start} + w + length;
auto wd = weekday{end};
if (wd == sat)
end += days{2};
else if (wd == sun)
end += days{1};
return end;
}
You could exercise it like this:
int
main()
{
using namespace date::literals;
std::cout << get_end_job_date(12_d/jul/2016, date::days{8}) << '\n';
}
Which outputs:
2016-07-21
This simplistic calculator has a precondition that start is not on a weekend. If that is not a desirable precondition then you could detect that prior to the computation and increment start internally by a day or two.
The date library takes care of things like the relationship between days and weeks, and how to add days to a date. It is based on very efficient (non-iterative) algorithms shown and described here.

Answer 2

If you aren't required to use a loop then you might want to consider refactoring your solution with a simpler calculation. Consider, for example, that every five business days automatically adds seven days to the date. Thus using the quotient and remainder of the days to add should tell you how many total days to add to your date variable without resorting to a brute force loop.
Since it's an exercise I won't get into specifics of code, but a few things to consider might be how you can figure out what day of the week you end on knowing the day that you started on. Also, if you end on a friday what happens with the weekend that immediately follows it.