Today’s programming challenge was to validate that two time ranges in the same day were not overlapping.

I had written over 50 lines of JavaScript with if this is before that then if this if after that other one then this – OR – the same in reverse and so on and so on. It was a lot of what seemed unnecessary code – un-elegant was how it felt (if that is a word).

So in the spirit of approaching a problem differently (no bullshit box terms here) I came up with the following solution.

We have time range A: 1AM to 3AM
We have time range B: 3AM to 4AM

or we could have the second range before the first

Range A: 3pm to 5pm
Range B: 1pm to 3pm

and I need to make sure they do not overlap – that is the only requirement

So I figured: if I make an array of every minute representing each time range and compared them, if there is no matches then there is no “overlap”.

So for the first time range I create an array of the minute-in-the-day (e.g. 1:01 am would be 61) from start to finish which looks like this [60, 61, 62, 63, 64] and then create another array of the second range [120, 121, 122, 123 ,124 etc] and do a comparison. If no matches then no overlap.

here is the functions:

function createMinuteArray(date1, date2){
	//this function creates an array of the number of minutes (in the day) between the start and end time
	// e.g.[60, 61, 62, 63]

    var arr = []

    var startMinute=(date1.getHours()*60)+date1.getMinutes()
    var endMinute=(date2.getHours()*60)+date2.getMinutes()

    for (var i=startMinute; i<endMinute; i++){
        arr.push(i)
    }

    return arr
}

function diffArray(arr1, arr2){
	//this function runs a test on all the values in arr1 and checks to see if that value is in arr2
	//if that is the case then there is overlap of the arrays and therefore return true
    for (i=0; i<arr1.length; i++){
        //I used jQuery inArray because I have IE8 requirement and arr1.indexOf is not supported
        if ($.inArray(arr1[i], arr2)>-1){
            //we have a match and therefore an overlap
            return true
        }
    }
    return false

}

and this is how they are called

var mealbreak = createMinuteArray(startTime1, endTime1)
var otherbreak = createMinuteArray(startTime2, endTime2)

//Check to see if any of the minutes in one array overlap with the minutes in the other one
var overlap = diffArray(mealbreak, otherbreak)

From there we can determine if(overlap) then fail validation

This could be used for comparing dates but would really be impractical – because that would be enormous arrays to create and compare.

I posted this as much in the spirit of – hey this is a different way of solving a problem, more so that a recommendation for how you should validate dates and times. Just something different 🙂