Encode the date in Christmas Eve format

Question

The day this post was published was Christmas Eve. Tomorrow will be Christmas. Yesterday was Christmas Eve Eve. In two days it will be

Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve

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Your job is to take the date the program is run and encode it in Christmas Eve format.

• If your program is run on Christmas, it should output the string "Christmas".
• If your program is not run on Christmas, it should output the string "Christmas", followed by the string " Eve" repeated n times, where n is the number of days until Christmas.
  • Note that this must be based on the next Christmas. For example, if the day is April 26, 2019, you must do your calculation based on December 25, 2019, not any other Christmas.
  • Remember to count leap days.
• Christmas is December 25th of every year.

This is code-golf, so the shortest code wins! Note though that the goal is not to find the shortest program in any language, but to find the shortest program in every particular language. For example, if you find the shortest C++ program, then it wins this contest for C++, even if someone finds a shorter program in Python.

Answer 1

SmileBASIC, 73 71 67 bytes

?"Christmas";
@L?" Eve"*(D!=P);
P=D
DTREAD OUT,M,D
IF M/D-.48GOTO@L

The program prints "Christmas", then prints " Eve" every time a day passes, until it is December 25th. (12/25 = 0.48)
May take up to a year to run.

Answer 2

Excel formula, 59 bytes

="Christmas"&REPT(" Eve",DATE(YEAR(NOW()+6),12,25)-TODAY())

Answer 3

Perl 6, 61 47 bytes

say 'Christmas'~' Eve'x(Date.today...^{.month==12&&.day==25})

say 'Christmas'~' Eve'x(Date.today...^/12\-25/)

Try it online!

-14 bytes (!) thanks to Jo King

Date.today ...^ /12\-25/ is the sequence of dates starting today and ending the day before Christmas. (The regular expression /12\-25/ is matched against the string representation of the dates.) The string " Eve" is replicated a number of times equal to the length of that sequence, and is output after the string "Christmas".

Answer 4

R, 112 106 72 bytes

Via @digEmAll and @J.Doe

x=Sys.Date()-1;cat('Christmas');while(!grepl('12-25',x<-x+1))cat(' Eve')

Try it online!

My original answer was prior to the clarification that the code was to take the date on which the code is run as input. It could be modified as above to save many bytes but I won't bother.

function(x,z=as.Date(paste0(strtoi(format(x,"%Y"))+0:1,"-12-25"))-x)cat("Christmas",rep("Eve",z[z>=0][1]))

Try it online!

Explanation: everyone's at church so I have time to do this. Extract the year, coerce to integer. Make vector of that year's Xmas and the next year's Xmas and subtract the input date to get a vector of two differences between the input date and those two Xmases.

Pick the non-negative one and cat "Christmas" with that many "Eves".

Answer 5

Windows PowerShell, 67 64 63 bytes

for(;1225-'{0:Md}'-f(date|% *ys $i)){$i++}'Christmas'+' eve'*$i

Try it online!

Managed to shave off 3 bytes 4 bytes (thanks Cows quack) by using the -format operator instead of .ToString(), and then subtracting the date string from the numerical value 1225 instead of doing a comparison with -ne. The resulting integer will be interpreted as a boolean for the conditional where 0 (which will happen on Christmas) is interpreted as False (don't enter the loop), and any other value is interpreted as True (enter the loop).

Since the integer is on the left now, the date string will be converted to the integer and math will be done, as opposed to the previous version where the 1225 integer was converted to string for the comparison.

Original Version

---

Windows PowerShell, 67 bytes

for(;(date|% *ys $i|% tost* Md)-ne1225){$i++};'Christmas'+' eve'*$i

Try it online!

Using a for loop as a while loop basically, because it's shorter. In the loop condition we check the current date (date, a shortened form of Get-Date), piped to ForEach-Object's alias %, using the form that can invoke a method by wildcarded name; in this case the method is AddDays() on the DateTime object, and the value we give it is $i.

This gets piped to ForEach-Object again to invoke the ToString() method, with format string Md (month, then day, minimal digits since we don't care for what comes next). This string is then tested to see if it's not equal -ne to the number 1225, which will be converted to a string for the comparison, saving me the quotes.

This is why it doesn't matter that the months and days are single digits, it will never be ambiguous because there's no other day of the year that would stringify to 1225.

The loop continues until the string is 1225. At the beginning of the program, $i will be zero so it will be comparing today's date, and the loop will never execute, but for any other day $i gets incremented in the loop body, so that we will have a count of how many days until the next Christmas, automatically accounting for leap years and whether or not Christmas passed this year.

After the loop we just output the string Christmas concatenated with the result of multiplying the string eve times the value of $i (which, on Christmas day, will be 0, resulting in no eves).

Answer 6

C# (Visual C# Interactive Compiler), 89 bytes

Write("Christmas");for(var t=DateTime.Now;$"{t:Md}"!="1225";t=t.AddDays(1))Write(" Eve");

Try it online!

-3 bytes thanks to @JeppeStigNielsen!

My strategy is pretty straightforward:

1. Initialize a loop variable t to the current date
2. Print Eve if t is not Christmas
3. Add a day to t and repeat

I tried some fancier things, but this way required the fewest bytes.

Answer 7

T-SQL, 92 88 bytes

PRINT'Christmas'+REPLICATE(' Eve',DATEDIFF(D,GETDATE(),STR(YEAR(GETDATE()+6))+'-12-25'))

Edit: Saved 4 bytes thanks to @BradC.

Answer 8

APL (Dyalog Unicode), 76 63 bytes^SBCS

Full program. Assumes ⎕IO←0 (zero-indexing).

⎕CY'dfns'
'Christmas',' Eve'⍴⍨4×12 25⍳⍨⍉2↑1↓⍉date(⍳366)+days⎕TS

Try it online!

⎕CY'dfns' copy in the dfns library

⎕TS current time stamp as [year,month,day,hour,min,sec,ms]
days^[c] find the number of days^[n] since 1899-12-31 00:00:00.000
(⍳366) add the first 366 integers (0…365) to that
date^[c] find the dates^[n] that correspond to those numbers (366×7 table; one column per unit)
⍉ transpose (7×366 table; one row per unit)
1↓ drop one row (the years)
2↑ take the first two rows (months and days)
12 25⍳⍨ find the index of the first Christmas
4× multiply that by four
' Eve'⍴⍨ use that to reshape the character list
'Christmas ', append that to this

^[c] code of that function
^[n] notes for that function

Answer 9

Python 2, 111 103 bytes

from datetime import*
d=date.today()
print"Christmas"+" Eve"*(date((d+timedelta(6)).year,12,25)-d).days

Try it online!

Update inspired by Richard Crossley's answer.

Explanation:

from datetime import*
# get today as a date, so we don't have to worry about rounding errors due to time
d=date.today()
                              # get the year of the Christmas to compare to
                              # if the current date is after this year's Christmas, the 6 day offset will give the next year
                              # otherwise, returns this year
                              (d+timedelta(6)).year
                         # next Christmas minus the current date
                         date(.....................,12,25)-d
# Christmas, plus (number of days until next Christmas) " Eve"s
print"Christmas"+" Eve"*(...................................).days

Answer 10

Ruby, 80 bytes

require'date'
t=Date.today
puts'Christmas'+' Eve'*(Date.new((t+6).year,12,25)-t)

Try it online!

Thanks to tsh for his idea

Answer 11

PHP, 61 bytes

Christmas<?for($t=time();date(md,$t+=86400)-1226;)echo" Eve";

Run with -n or try it online.

Answer 12

JavaScript, 135 131 121 92 88 bytes

My first (naïve) solution (135b):

t=new Date();n=new Date();n.setMonth(11);n.setDate(25);'Christmas'+' Eve'.repeat((n>=t?n-t:(n.setFullYear(n.getFullYear()+1)-t))/864e5)

It sets 2 dates: now and Xmas of this year. If the latter hasn't passed yet, it just diffs them, if it has passed, diffs to next year's Xmas. Uses either diffs for the number of repeats.

(Trying to) Think Outside the Box (131b):

i=0;f=_=>{t=new Date();if(t.getMonth()!=11||t.getDate()!=25){i++;setTimeout(f,864e5)}else{alert('Christmas'+' Eve'.repeat(i))}};f()

The challange specifies WHICH output is required when running the program on a given day, but doesn't specify WHEN to return it...

This will just 'sleep' for a day, increment a counter by 1, and repeat till it's Xmas in order to give the output.

Since JavaScript doesn't guarantee the 'sleep' time, the actual result might be off.

It is also ugly for using the alert function, which means wer'e actually not dealing with pure JavaScript, but with browser APIs as well (we can use console.log at the cost of 6 extra bytes).

A better approach (121b):

t=new Date();i=0;while(t.getMonth()!=11||t.getDate()!=25){t=new Date(t.valueOf()+864e5);i++};'Christmas'+' Eve'.repeat(i)

Starting from today, increment the date by a day until it's Xmas, then use that loop's counter for the number of repeats required.

Improving (including going through a minifier and using 12Me21's trick to shave extra 5b) (92b):

for(s='Christmas',t=new Date;t.getMonth()/t.getDate()-.44;)t=new Date(t*1+864e5),s+=' Eve';s

Final touches (88b):

for(s='Christmas',t=new Date;t.getMonth()/(d=t.getDate())-.44;t.setDate(d+1))s+=' Eve';s

• For all of the above, REPL is assumed.
• See Vadim's submission - much better than mine!

Answer 13

Python 2, 128 bytes / Python 3, 130 bytes

of course, two less bytes with Python 2

from datetime import date as D
T=D.today()
Y=T.year
a=(D(Y,12,25)-T).days
print("Christmas"+" Eve"*[a,(D(Y+1,12,25)-T).days][a<0])

Answer 14

Bash +GNU date, 72 73 bytes

for((d=0;1`date +%d%m -d$d\day`-12512;d++));{ x+=\ Eve;};echo Christmas$x

• one byte saved replacing != with -
• another removing extra space
• fix -3 bytes d=0, because date -dday is date+1 and doesn't work on 25/12

Try it online

Answer 15

Bash, 68 65 61 bytes

Golfed 4 bytes thanks to Nahuel Fouilleul by using `` command substitution and eval in place of sed e and xargs

echo Christmas `eval date\ -d{0..366}day\;|sed /c.25/Q\;cEve`

Try it online!

Inside the `` command substitution, we have

eval run the following string as shell commands

• date\ -d{0..366}day\; under brace expansion of {0..366}, this results in the string date -d0day; date -d1day; date -d2day; ... date -d366day;, each command in this string computing the date between 0 and 366 days from present resulting in output of the format Wed Dec 26 18:22:33 UTC 2018, with each in its own line

|sed upon which, call the following sed commands

• /c.25/Q if the regex /c.25/ is matched, Quit without printing

• \;cEve otherwise change the line to Eve

All the required number of Eves are produced each on its own line. This output is captured in ``, and is subject to word splitting where words are split on newlines. Each word is fed as an argument to echo.

echo Christmas ...

Each argument to echo is printed by being separated by spaces, resulting in the desired output.

Answer 16

VBA (Excel), 108 bytes

Copy in a blank module. Prints to the Immediate window:

Sub X:s="Christmas":d=Now:For t=1 To (DateSerial(Year(d+6),12,25)-d):s=s &" Eve":Next:Debug.Print s:End Sub

Note: Using : instead of line breaks saves two bytes per line.

Notice that the VBA editor will insert additional spaces between keywords, operators, etc... and parenthesis after the Sub definition, but if you copy and paste this code it will work (I couldn't get rid of that space before the &).

Not bad for VBA (for once).

Answer 17

Groovy, 66 bytes

d=[]as Date
print'Christmas'+' Eve'*(new Date((d+6).year,11,25)-d)

Try it online!

Courtesy of @ASCII-only

Answer 18

C (gcc), 157 bytes

I thought that I would be able to avoid including time.h but that just gave segment faults.

#include <time.h>
*t,u;f(){time(&u);t=localtime(&u);t[5]+=t[4]>10&t[3]>25;t[4]=11;t[3]=25;u-=mktime(t);printf("Christmas");for(u/=86400;u++;printf(" Eve"));}

Try it online!

Answer 19

Scala, 116 113 bytes

var d=new java.util.Date
print("Christmas")
while(!(""+d).contains("c 25")){print(" Eve");d.setDate(d.getDate+1)}

Try it online!

Where c 25 is short for Dec 25.

Answer 20

Python 3, 106 Bytes

from datetime import*
d=date.today()
print("Christmas"+" Eve"*(date((d+timedelta(6)).year,12,25)-d).days)

Answer 21

JavaScript, 86 77 bytes

Using REPL it would be

for(c='Christmas',d=new Date;!/c 25/.test(d);d=new Date(+d+864e5))c+=' Eve';c

Kudos to ASCII-only for -9 bytes

Answer 22

Lua, 137 118 bytes.

118 bytes

t,d,month,day=os.time,os.date,1,-6year=d"%Y"+(d"%D">"12/25"and 2or 1)print("Christmas",d" Eve":rep(d("%j",t(_G)-t())))

137 bytes (previous)

t,d=os.time,os.date a=d"*t"a.year,a.month,a.day=a.year+(d"%m%d">"1225"and 1 or 0),12,25 print("Christmas",("Eve "):rep((t(a)-t())/86400))

It's worth noting that it doesn't work in LuaJIT (syntax error)

Answer 23

MySQL, 102 bytes

pretty much the same as Neil´s T-SQL answer. There seems to be no shorter way in SQL.

select concat("Christmas",repeat(" Eve",datediff(concat(year(now()+interval 6 day),"-12-25"),now())));

Try it online.

Answer 24

Scala, 123 bytes

Thanks to ASCII-only's work.

print("Christmas")
var d=new java.util.Date
while(d.getMonth()<11||d.getDate()!=25){print(" Eve");d.setDate(d.getDate()+1)}

Try it online!

Scala + Joda-Time, 140 bytes

import org.joda.time._
var s="Christmas"
var d=DateTime.now
while(d!=d.withDate(d.year().get(),12,25)){d=d.plusDays(1);s+=" Eve"};println(s)

Does not run in TIO since it requires Joda-Time library.

Answer 25

MATLAB, 91 bytes

n=datetime
x=datetime(year(n+6),12,25)
s='Christmas'
while days(x-n)>=1 n=n+1 s=[s,' Eve'] end

MATLAB Non-looper, 100 bytes

x=datenum(datetime(floor((now+5)/365.2425),12,25))
d=x-now
['Christmas' repmat(' Eve',1,min(d(d>=0)))]

Answer 26

05AB1E, 93 89 bytes

žežfžg)V'ŒÎ[Y¨JŽ9ÚQ#Y`2ô0Kθ4ÖUD2Qi\28X+ë31s<7%É-}‹iY¬>0ëYT`ǝDÅsD12‹i>1ë\1Dǝ¤>2}}ǝVð'»ˆ}J™

Try it online or Try it online with an emulated self-specified date of 'today'.

Explanation:

05AB1E doesn't have any builtins for dates, except for receiving the current year/month/day/hours/minutes/seconds/microseconds, so most bytes are used for manual calculations.

žežfžg)V   # Get the current date and save it in variable `Y`
'ŒÎ       '# Push compressed string "christmas"
[          # Start an infinite loop
 Y¨JŽ9ÚQ   #  If the current date is December 25th:
        #  #   Stop the infinite loop
 Y`2ô0Kθ4ÖUD2Qi\28X+ë31s<7%É-}‹iY¬>0ëYT`ǝDÅsD12‹i>1ë\1Dǝ¤>2}}ǝV
           #  Go to the next day, and set `Y` to it
 ð         #  Push a space " "
 '»ˆ      '#  Push compressed string "eve"
}          # After the infinite loop:
 J         # Join everything on the stack together
  ™        # And make every word title-case (and output the result implicitly)

See this answer of mine to understand how we go to the next day. (PS: 1¾ǝ has been replaced with T`ǝ, since we use the counter_variable somewhere else as well.)

See this 05AB1E tip of mine (sections How to use the dictionary? and How to compress large integers?) to understand why '»ˆ is "eve"; 'ŒÎ is "christmas"; and Ž9Ú is 1225.

Answer 27

C# (Visual C# Interactive Compiler), 141 bytes

var g=DateTime.Now;Write("Christmas"+string.Concat(Enumerable.Repeat(" Eve",(new DateTime(g.Year+(g.Day>25&g.Month>11?1:0),12,25)-g).Days)));

Try it online!

Answer 28

Red, 89 86 84 78 76 bytes

-10 bytes thanks to ASCII-only!

does[a: now prin"Christmas"while[a/3 * 31 + a/4 <> 397][prin" Eve"a: a + 1]]

Try it online!

Answer 29

Perl 5, 68 bytes

print"Christmas";print" Eve"while localtime($i++*86400+time)!~/c 25/

Try it online!

Where c 25 is short for Dec 25.