How to Coda with months
this month, last month and next month
In my previous blog on weeks I showed a simple principle to get all dates this week, last week and next week. We do more or less the same with month, but a bit different because unlike weeks, month differ in length.
Months have mostly 30 or 31 days, sometimes 28 and once in a while 29 days. Their length is irregular. Luckily for us, we have a function that helps us to get this number per month. You see it already in my solution for all dates this month. It is EndOfMonth().
The EndOfMonth() function outputs a date and has two variables:
- the date you want to use to get the last date of a month
- the option to get an outcome related to this month (0), previous month (-1), next month (1) and so forth. The number indicates the month counted from the date in the first part.
When we want to have the dates of this month, we go one month back and ask for the last date of that month. By adding one we add a day to this date and we get the first date of this month (last day previous month + 1). The second part is obvious, we get the last date of this month. Via Sequence() all dates in between and the ForEach() helps us to turn each number (dates are numbers) into a readable date format.
All dates last and next month
With the example above you can already see the pattern we follow. The last part with the ForEach won’t change. We only have a look at the months and thus mainly at the second part of The EndOfMonth() function.
Once you see the above, the below shown solution is easy to comprehend:
All these solutions have in common that we create a list of dates using sequence. With weeks we could play with the number 7, months require the function EndOfMonth().
I hope this article was informative and helpful. Did it help you to solve a problem you unlike would have solved other ways? What about a donation?
My name is Christiaan, and I regularly blog about Coda. While this article is free, my professional services (including consultations) are not, but I’m always happy to chat and explore potential solutions. You can find my free contributions in the Coda Community and on X. The Coda Community is a fantastic resource for free insights, especially when you share a sample doc.
