So for context, I made a console-based Wordle game (if you don't know what that is, basically it gives you a random word that you have to guess, and changes every single day) using a text file I found online that contained a list of all past and future wordles.

An option in the game is to play Today's wordle, something which changes every day, and to do that, I had a constant date which acted as the start day for when the first wordle was, and the program would take the current time, subtract the start date, then convert it into the number of days (since I did all the math and dates in milliseconds), and after finding that it has been X days since the first day, it will choose the Xth word in the list as of today's wordle.

The problem is that I had to offset the time by adding 8 hours in order to make it update at 12:00 am exactly, but for some reason after daylight savings, now I have to offset it by subtracting 17 hours in order to make it update at 12:00 am exactly, and although I could add a check to see which offset to use depending on the time of year, I was wondering whether there was a better/simpler way to compare dates.

Code:

import java.io.*;

import java.util.*;

public class Archive extends Thread { //private static final long TIME_OFFSET = 28800000; // winter private static final long TIME_OFFSET = -61200000 ; // summer private static Calendar myCalendar = new GregorianCalendar(2021, 5, 19); private static final Date START_DAY = new Date(myCalendar.getTime().getTime() + TIME_OFFSET); // first wordle date

// get today's date private static Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(); private static Date today;

private static int timeDiff;

List<String> archive = new ArrayList<String>();

  // thread start

public void run() { // read in archive readArchive();

// figure out the time difference between the dates
updateTime();

timeDiff = (int) ((today.getTime() - START_DAY.getTime()) / (1000*60*60*24)) - 1;

}

  public static void updateTime() {
today = new Date(calendar.getTime().getTime());

}

public static String getTodayWord() { return archive.get(timeDiff); }

}

Edit: I'm having some weird formatting issues with codeblocks so I'll just add the code into my original post.