Get and Calculate Ordinal Dates

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#1

I happened to learn the other day that there is something called an ordinal date, which is composed of four digits representing the year and three digits representing the day of the year. These are often separated by a dash.

Just for learning purposes, I thought I would see how ordinal dates might be created and calculated with in a shortcut. Creating an ordinal date from a calendar date is simple:

Get Ordinal Date of Current Date
Get Ordinal Date of Current Date2100×800 119 KB

Get Ordinal Date of Current Date.shortcut (21.6 KB)

Creating a calendar date from an ordinal date involves a bit more work. From what I understand, ordinal dates normally don’t include a time component.

Get Calendar Date from Ordinal Date
Get Calendar Date from Ordinal Date2040×1916 276 KB

Get Calendar Date from Ordinal Date.shortcut (22.6 KB)

Various approaches can be used to get the number of days between two ordinal dates, and the following is one example. The timing result was 50 milliseconds.

Ordinal Date Calculation
Ordinal Date Calculation1920×1777 135 KB

Ordinal Date Calculation.shortcut (23.5 KB)

#2

FYI, NSDateFormatter can create an NSDate / Applescript date from the ordinal format syntax directly

use AppleScript version "2.5"
use framework "Foundation"
use scripting additions

on ordinalDate from dateString
	set theFormatter to current application's NSDateFormatter's new()
	set theFormatter's locale to current application's NSLocale's localeWithLocaleIdentifier:"en_US_POSIX"
	set theFormatter's dateFormat to "yyyy-D"
	return (theFormatter's dateFromString:dateString) as date
end ordinallDate


set theDate to ordinalDate from "2026-160" -- date "Tuesday, 9 June 2026 at 00:00:00"
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