I recently found myself having a DateTime value and needing to calculate the date of the first day in the week that my known date was in using C#. While this is one of those things that are pretty simple to do once you know the solution it did take me a couple of hours to get it right. It turns out that something as simple as calculating a the first day of a week is trickier than one might expect, at least if we want a solution that works for all cultures.
My first instinct was to calculate the first day of a week by subtracting dayInWeek.DayOfWeek - firstDayInWeek days from dayInWeek where dayInWeek is a DateTime specifying a date in the week. That worked fine as long as I did the calculations in an environment where the culture was English, where the first day of the week is Sunday which is enumerated as 0 in DayOfWeek (against international standards which says the first day of the week is monday). As I shifted to using a Swedish culture it broke down and I had to find a better solution.
Heres what I finally came up with:
using System;
using System.Globalization;
public static class FirstDayOfWeekUtility
{
/// <summary>
/// Returns the first day of the week that the specified
/// date is in using the current culture.
/// </summary>
public static DateTime GetFirstDayOfWeek(DateTime dayInWeek)
{
CultureInfo defaultCultureInfo = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture;
return GetFirstDateOfWeek(dayInWeek, defaultCultureInfo);
}
/// <summary>
/// Returns the first day of the week that the specified date
/// is in.
/// </summary>
public static DateTime GetFirstDayOfWeek(DateTime dayInWeek, CultureInfo cultureInfo)
{
DayOfWeek firstDay = cultureInfo.DateTimeFormat.FirstDayOfWeek;
DateTime firstDayInWeek = dayInWeek.Date;
while (firstDayInWeek.DayOfWeek != firstDay)
firstDayInWeek = firstDayInWeek.AddDays(-1);
return firstDayInWeek;
}
}