Creating a JavaScript Function to Calculate Whether It's a Leap Year

Calculating whether it's a leap year isn't a straightforward as you might think! Here's how leap years are calculated, as described on Wikipedia:

In the Gregorian calendar, each leap year has 366 days instead of 365, by extending February to 29 days rather than the common 28. These extra days occur in each year which is an integer multiple of 4 (except for years evenly divisible by 100, which are not leap years unless evenly divisible by 400).

Wat? 🤯

Let's break this down into enumerable steps, which we can then convert into code:

Note: This is an academic exercise! If you're going to do any date calculations in a production application, I'd strongly encourage you to use a tried-and-true library like moment.js. Dates can be tricky and you don't want to hit nasty bugs rolling your own solution!

1) If a year is divisible by 400, it's a leap year
2) Otherwise, if a year is divisible by 100, it's not a leap year
3) Otherwise, if a year is divisible by 4, it's a leap year

This is fairly straightforward now and can be converted into code:

function isLeapYear(year) {
  if (year % 400 === 0) return true;
  if (year % 100 === 0) return false;
  return year % 4 === 0;
}

And we can test a few scenarios:

isLeapYear(2000) // true
isLeapYear(2001) // false
isLeapYear(2004) // true
isLeapYear(2100) // false

Happy coding!

Comments

[Lucas de Brito Silva]

You can do a ternary condition to minimize lines, like this:

function isLeapYear(year) {
    return true ? ((year % 400 === 0) || (year % 100 !== 0)) && ((year % 4) == 0) : false;
};

[Nick Scialli (he/him)]

I don't think this will evaluate correctly. Also, long one-liners can feel efficient but they're often pretty hard for others to understand.

[Lucas de Brito Silva]

Really, for those who are not used to it, it is difficult to understand. When I started working with tender conditions I thought "This is very strange!", but I forced myself to learn (even to leave the comfort zone) and now it has become very simple. It's a matter of habit, and believe me, it works perfectly!

[Nick Scialli (he/him)]

What I'm saying is that your function literally doesn't work correctly.

isLeapYear(2100);
// true

That's incorrect.

[Lucas de Brito Silva]

Oh, sorry, you're right! I forget something.
Try again with my changes.

[Nick Scialli (he/him)]

In this case, why do you even need the ternary? true will always evaluate to true.

In other words, this:

true ? ((year % 400 === 0) || (year % 100 !== 0)) && ((year % 4) == 0) : false;

is the exact same thing as this:

((year % 400 === 0) || (year % 100 !== 0)) && ((year % 4) == 0);

[Lucas de Brito Silva]

Perfect!!
I totally agree with you! 👏👏👏👏👏👏

[CREEE]

Very clean. But do the 3 parts in the opposite order.

Assuming you get years randomly, most will be not %4, so handle those first.
Similarly, most %4 years will be not %100, so those are next.

just in case the price of 2 extra "if"s is going to break you.

[Samuel Huang]

I love these short questions and simple explanations! Please do more of these 😁

[Korex]

Wow this is straight forward. Thanks for sharing.

[CREEE]

Clever, but too obscure to save 2 lines of code.

Moreover, using date libs is not cricket. If you have those, I presume you can just ask

Date.isLeapYear(year)

(with some syntax or other)

[Thomas Bnt]

Oh great :o