Date manipulation in C++

Question

I am sure that this kind of questions must have been asked before, but failed to find anything by searching this site. My apologies in advance if I missed any similar questions.

1. Is there anything in C++ that just does date manipulation at all? I am aware of SYSTEMTIME structure (it is the structure returned when you do GetSystemTime I think) but it does not seem to contain any manipulation functions. For example, I am looking at something which can do "give me the day of the second Tuesday in July 2010". Also, fitting a time not sourced from the system clock into a SYSTEMTIME structure just seems, well, wrong.

2. Is there any library routine to validate a date at all? I am not thinking about the basic "check day is between 1 and 28". The routine must be able to say that 29-02-2009 does not exist, for example.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You should check out Boost::DateTime.

But to answer your question there is no date time 'handling' as such in C++

Answer 2

The SYSTEMTIME structure and GetSystemTime() function are Windows API functions and aren't really part of the core language or standard library. I know this is a little picky but this might save some embarrassment later on if someone who isn't on Windows reads this.

I'd certainly second the recommendation for the Boost::DateTime library that Chris made. That aside if you want to write standard C++ you've really only got the old C date and time functions that are also in ctime. But unless you're really stuck in a shop where you can't use boost for whatever reason, I'd go with Boost::DateTime.