week

Most programming languages provide a way to get the week number of a given date. For an SQL example, check out my previous article: SQL: year of an ISO week.

In C# you can use the following:

int week = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetWeekOfYear(date, CalendarWeekRule.FirstFourDayWeek, DayOfWeek.Monday);

But there's usually no function provided to get the first day of a given week and year. The shortest (but still readable) way that I can get up with in C# is the following:

In MS-SQL you can get the ISO 8601 week date easily by using something like:

SELECT DATEPART(isoww, '2012-01-01')

This will tell you that January 1st of 2012 belongs to week 52. But it doesn't tell you that it belongs to year 2011! The shortest way to get the correct year is:

SELECT YEAR(DATEADD(day, 26 - DATEPART(isoww, '2012-01-01'), '2012-01-01'))

This will add some days to the date if it belongs to a week with a low number. It will subtract some days if it belongs to a week with a high number. The year of that date will always be the correct "ISO week year".