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holidayChecker

Check whether a given date is a holiday - locale-aware

This library allows you to check a single day against one or multiple calendars to see whether the given day is a holiday or not.

That also includes "named Days" that are not necessarily "free" but have a special name like "Maundy Thursday".

Installation

holidayChecker is best installed using composer

Usage

Simple usage:

$result has 3 methods:

• isHoliday is when the day is a free day according to the local law. Otherwise it's
• isNamed is when the day has a special name despite being not a free day.
• getName contains the name of a named day.

You can also get a with a 2-letter ISO 3166-1 or a 4-letter ISO 3166-2 code. And when different language-variations are available you can get them by adding the ISO 639-1 language-code before the ISO 3166-code:

Available Countries

Currently these countries are available:

• Germany (all Bundesländer, german)
• Luxemburg (german, french and luxembourgisch)
• Belgium (flamisch and french)
• Netherlands (dutch)
• France (Mainland and overseas, adaptions for Elsass/Lothringen, french)
• United Kingdom (Islands, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England, englisch)
• Finland
• Russia
• Greece
• Turkey
• South Africa (english)
• Ireland (english and irish)
• Spain (all provinces, spanish)
• Portugal (mainland, Madeira and Azores, portuguese)
• Denmark (danish)
• Sweden (swedish)
• Norway (bokmål)
• Poland (polish)
• Austria (german)
• Italy (italian)
• Canada (french and english)
• United States (Federal holidays only - english)
• Brazil (brazilian portuguese)
• Japan (needs better way to handle Equinoxes)
• Chinese (Needs better way to handle solar terms)
• Afghanistan (english)
• Albania (Albanian)
• Algeria (English)
• Andorra (all parishes)
• Angola
• Antigua and Barbuda
• Argentina
• Armenia
• Australia including Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Norfolk Island
• Azerbaijan
• Bahamas
• Bahrain
• Bangladesh (missing calculation of Hindu and Buddhist holidays)
• Barbados
• Belarus
• Belize
• Benin
• Bermuda
• Bhutan
• Bolivia
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Botswana
• Brunei
• Burkina Faso
• Burundi
• Bulgaria
• Cambodia
• Cameroon
• Cape Verde
• Central African Republic
• Mexico
• Chad
• Chile
• Ivory Coast
• Colombia
• Comoros
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Republic of Congo
• Costa Rica
• Croatia
• Cuba
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Switzerland
• Hungary

But the list is constantly extending.

Extending

Currently not all countries holidays are available. We are trying to fix that but you might find that exactly the country you need is missing.

As the holidays are retrieved from XML-files you can add your own ones without issue. They need to correspond to the Schema-file and before the schema is checked any XInclude-statements are executed.

You can then load the holidays from your file using the -method.

If you think the XML-files might be usefull for others you should think about contributing back and open a PullRequest here or attach them to an issue you open.

We'd be very thankfull!

Comparison

Yasumi

The main other library in the PHP-ecosystem that also provides holiday-calendars is the Yasumi-library. There are some differences between those two libraries though that I want to highlight here.

The main difference is that Yasumi is a purely programatical library. The holidays and their rules are written down in code. Extending the library by adding new calendars or modifying existing ones to own requirements requires actual coding. Contrary to that in this library the actual data is provided in XML-files. SO adding new calendars or extending existing ones requires one to create a new or modify an existing XML-file. Whether that is easier that doing PHP-programming is up to the user to decide.

Besides that Yasumi uses pre-calculated dates for holidays that are based on a non-gregorian calendar like for islamic, jewish or lunar-based holidays. This library on the other side defines holidays based on the day in a certain calendar. For that we use the ICUs calendars under the hood which allows us to declare holidays based on the buddhist, chinese, coptic, ethiopian, hebrew, indian, islamic, japanese and persian calendar. For the islamic calendar we support different versions of day-calculation, mainly the astronomical and the civilian calendar. Both libraries have their issues when a calendaring system is used, that is based on an actual person observing something like the islamic calendar used in Saudi-Arabia. As these calendars are based on visual observation they can not be precalculated and therefore not be used with a precalculating library.

Given this difference the Yasumi-Library currently only allows usage of dates between 1949 and 2050 whereas this library is free in the daterange to be used.

Another difference are the requirements. While Yasumi only requires a PHP of up to PHP7.4 with the JSON extension available this library requires the DOM-extension (XML) as well as the INTL-extension as we are using that to calculate holidays based on different calendaring systems. This library also requires a library to compare dateintervals which is used in the calculation of the easter-date.

Calendarific

Calendarific is an SaaS Provider that provides worldwide Bank-Holidays and Observances via An API.

They are currently supporting all countries worldwide. Their API can be queried for holiday information on a per country and year basis. It is possible to only fetch information to a sub-area of a country (like states in the US or Kantone in Switzerland). YOu can also just check one specific day by providing the day and the month along with the year.

As the pricing of the API limits the number of API calls per month, calling the API on a per-day basis migth not be the best of ideas. Also the API provides information for either local, national or religious holidays as well as observances (where observances in one region can be national or regional holidays in another region). Sadly it seems not to be possible to fetch only regional and national holidays in one request. It is either all of them or only a single one. And as the "observation" type is rather chatty (it contains a lot of special dates that might or might not have any relevance at all - like astronomical observations that might be calculated better using separate libraries)

So as consumer it requires a lot of work afterwards to get the actualy required data when wanting to get the information whether a certain day is a holiday in the requested area or not.

It serves a purpose and is readily available. At a price.

Missing Features

Business-Days

Some people were asking about a feature to calculate working days. While that seems to be a neat function I decided against implementing it in the library as business-days are very domain-specific. While there are some generally accepted terms of "working days" being monday through saturday excludign the public holidays that is not always and everywhere the correct way. SO depending on your business-domain workdays might only be monday through friday and not all public holidays are actually excluded but only a subset. Like bank-holidays in the UK that are only for banks a holiday, but for a lot of other businesses they mean business-as-usual. Or perhaps not, depending on a lot of different factors.

To not lead people into false expectations and use amagic that will bite back rather sooner than later I decided to not implement this in the library but leave that to your business-logic.

To give you an idea how such a feature could look like I wrote an example that show that most of the required code is actually business-case related or required for setup. Only three lines are related to this library. So having a dedicated class for that in this library doesn't seem to make sense.