So I am lazy – nothing new there. I am also a manager (nothing new there either unfortunately) and I track hours in a spreadsheet. Yes we have a proper system for hours tracking and billing but I am old school and I prefer the layout I created and have used for yeeeears.

Anyway, so it is new project time and I need to create a set of dates from this Friday – every Friday out through the next 3 months. I am sure there is a smart way to do that in Excel but I wanted to do it in JavaScript – ‘cos I can, and ‘cos I want to keep kidding myself I am a developer 😉

A quick Google search found this snippet which is almost what I was looking for http://stackoverflow.com/a/4413721/1171653 (look at the example)

I modified the sample code slightly to return the format I was looking for – starting today – 02/26/2015

Date.prototype.addDays = function(days) {
    var dat = new Date(this.valueOf())
    dat.setDate(dat.getDate() + days);
    return dat;
}

function getDates(startDate, stopDate) {
    var dateArray = new Array();
    var currentDate = startDate;
    while (currentDate <= stopDate) {
        var day = currentDate.getDate()
        var month = currentDate.getMonth()+1
        var year = currentDate.getFullYear()
        dateArray.push(day+"/"+month+"/"+year )
        currentDate = currentDate.addDays(7);
    }
    return dateArray;
}

var dateArray = getDates((new Date()).addDays(2), (new Date()).addDays(90));

console.log(dateArray)

Loaded it into the firebug console and produced the following which is easily copy/pasteable into Excel

[“28/2/2015”, “7/3/2015”, “14/3/2015”, “21/3/2015”, “28/3/2015”, “4/4/2015”, “11/4/2015”, “18/4/2015”, “25/4/2015”, “2/5/2015”, “9/5/2015”, “16/5/2015”, “23/5/2015”]

It took me longer to write this up on the blog than do it.

But now I have a reference point so that when I need it for the next project I can come and get this code 🙂

Lazy 🙂