How to get a Month Name in Python

Here’s the shortest method I could come up with:


>>> named_month = lambda month_num:datetime.date(1900,month_num,1).strftime('%B')
>>> print named_month(5)
'May'

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Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) on Apr 16th, 2009 and is filed under Python.

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5 Responses to “How to get a Month Name in Python”

  1. Jeremy Banks says:
    April 16th, 2009 at 11:02 pm

    Here’s a 12-character-shorter version that I feel is nicer.

    named_month = lambda month_num:calendar.month_name[month_num]

    Obviously requiring import calendar beforehand, as yours requires import datetime.

  2. Jeremy Banks says:
    April 16th, 2009 at 11:08 pm

    This didn’t occur to me as instantly, but if we were golfing a usable function, it would probably be shortest to do:

    named_month = calendar.month_name.__getitem__

    … which works the same (slightly more efficient, actually) and knocks off a further 16 characters. It is probably less readable, though. Actually, those 16 characters is the same amount we’d save if we used a single-character identifier for the index (which we obviously don’t want to do for readability reasons, so it’s probably not really a noteworthy saving at all.

  3. rgz says:
    April 16th, 2009 at 11:31 pm

    If you don’t mind that it isn’t a function why not?
    from calendar import month_name
    But since calendar is in the stdlib I encourage you to use calendar.month_name[] every time except in CPU bound loops.

  4. Rob says:
    April 17th, 2009 at 11:57 am

    @Jeremy

    Are you sure that would work if the calendar module were reimplemented in C?

  5. Jeremy Banks says:
    April 17th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

    @Rob

    I’m not confident, but I don’t see why not. It’s a public data attribute of the module, so it would be available, and .__getitem__ should still work on it regardless of if it’s implemented in C or Python (it works for builtins written in C, such as lists).

    I don’t think it’s a good approach, since using special methods directly should be avoided if possible, but as far as I know it should work.