Does anyone know if there is a way to set the first day of the week on a NSCalendar, or is there a calendar that already has Monday as the first day of the week, instead of Sunday. I'm currently working on an app that is based around a week's worth of work, and it needs to start on Monday, not Sunday. I can most likely do some work to work around this, but there will be a lot of corner cases. I'd prefer the platform do it for me.

Thanks in advance

Here's some the code that I'm using. it's saturday now, so what I would hope is that weekday would be 6, instead of 7. that would mean that Sunday would be 7 instead of rolling over to 0

NSCalendar *gregorian = [[NSCalendar alloc] initWithCalendarIdentifier:NSGregorianCalendar];
[gregorian setFirstWeekday:0];
unsigned unitFlags = NSYearCalendarUnit | NSMonthCalendarUnit |  NSDayCalendarUnit | NSWeekCalendarUnit | NSWeekdayCalendarUnit;
NSDateComponents *todaysDate = [gregorian components:unitFlags fromDate:[NSDate date]];
int dayOfWeek = todaysDate.weekday;

Edit: This does not check the edge case where the beginning of the week starts in the prior month. Some updated code to cover this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14688780/308315


In case anyone is still paying attention to this, you need to use

ordinalityOfUnit:inUnit:forDate:

and set firstWeekday to 2. (1 == Sunday and 7 == Saturday)

Here's the code:

NSCalendar *gregorian = [[[NSCalendar alloc] initWithCalendarIdentifier:NSGregorianCalendar] autorelease];
[gregorian setFirstWeekday:2]; // Sunday == 1, Saturday == 7
NSUInteger adjustedWeekdayOrdinal = [gregorian ordinalityOfUnit:NSWeekdayCalendarUnit inUnit:NSWeekCalendarUnit forDate:[NSDate date]];
NSLog(@"Adjusted weekday ordinal: %d", adjustedWeekdayOrdinal);

Remember, the ordinals for weekdays start at 1 for the first day of the week, not zero.

Documentation link.


This code constructs a date that is set to Monday of the current week:

NSCalendar *gregorian = [[NSCalendar alloc] initWithCalendarIdentifier:NSGregorianCalendar];

NSDate *today = [NSDate date];
NSDate *beginningOfWeek = nil;
BOOL ok = [gregorian rangeOfUnit:NSWeekCalendarUnit startDate:&beginningOfWeek
                                interval:NULL forDate: today];

setFirstWeekday: on the NSCalendar object. Sets the index of the first weekday for the receiver.

- (void)setFirstWeekday:(NSUInteger)weekday

Should do the trick.


In my opinion this settings should be dynamic according to the user locale. Therefore one should use:

NSCalendar *gregorian = [[NSCalendar alloc] initWithCalendarIdentifier:NSGregorianCalendar];
[gregorian setLocale:[NSLocale currentLocale]];

This will cause the calendar to set the first week day according to the user locale automatically. Unless you are developing your app for a specific purpose/user locale (or prefer to allow the user to choose this day).


I've done it like this.

NSCalendar *gregorian = [[NSCalendar alloc] initWithCalendarIdentifier:NSGregorianCalendar];
NSDate *today = [NSDate date];
NSDateComponents *compForWeekday = [gregorian components:(NSWeekdayCalendarUnit) fromDate:today];
NSInteger weekDayAsNumber = [compForWeekday weekday]; // The week day as number but with sunday starting as 1

weekDayAsNumber = ((weekDayAsNumber + 5) % 7) + 1; // Transforming so that monday = 1 and sunday = 7