Operating with dates

Question

Hi,
I would need some help from you, I would have to sub two dates in order to know how many months are between those dates.
Since I haven't seen any method neither in Calendar nor Date classes I'm doing this:
long dateIniL = dateIni.getTime();
long dateToL = nextBDate.getTime();
long result = dateToL - dateIniL;
long months = result / 1000 / 60 / 60 / 24 / 30;
int m = (int) months;
but, I'm not sure divided by 30 for getting months is ok because there are months with 28,29,30 and 31 days ...
Do you know a better way to do this?
Thanks

Answer 1

That is the problem, not all months are 31 days, so
to calculate the number of months manually is a
problem, I think it would have been done already in a
method or so.No, I think the problem is you haven't made your mind what a month actually is. See, in the common sense, a "month" is one of twelve things: January, February, March, you name it. That's a "month". These are defined periods in the year, independently of the year (except for february). They're not time units.
On the other hand, one often uses the term "month" to describe a period of approximatively thirty days. But that's approximative. It's not defined.
To count how many "months" there were between two given dates, you must either:
a) define a time period (in days or hours or cheeseburgers) that you'll call a "month"
or b) decide whether to count the real months between the dates, and for that you must decide whether to count the months (real months) strictly between (i.e. exclude the months the dates are in from the count) or to include these months.
At least that's how I see it.