Date of Monday of a given week, independent of NLS

Question

I have an input date (say sysdate) and I want to get the date of the previous Monday. I tried

select trunc(sysdate, 'D') from dual;

but it is NLS dependent. Also I don't want to go around with checking the result by name because it may vary depending on the language of the country that my code will run on.

Answer 1

Try to use ISO weeks

SELECT TRUNC(SYSDATE, 'IW') - 7 previous_monday FROM dual

Here is SQLFiddle demo