In Perl how to find the date of the previous Monday for a given date?

Question

I am looking for a Perl script which can give me the last Monday for any specified date.

e.g. For date 2011-06-11, the script should return 2011-06-06

Answer 1

Pretty simple stuff using the standard Perl library.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Time::Local;
use POSIX 'strftime';

my $date = shift || die "No date given\n";

my @date = split /-/, $date;
$date[0] -= 1900;
$date[1]--;

die "Invalid date: $date\n" unless @date == 3;

my $now = timelocal(0, 0, 12, reverse @date);

while (strftime('%u', localtime $now) != 1) {
  $now -= 24 * 60 * 60;
}

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up the various modules and functions used.

It's probably even simpler if you use DateTime.