Comments on: How to get a Month Name in Python

By: Jeremy Banks

Jeremy Banks — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:51:40 +0000

@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.

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:57:04 +0000

@Jeremy

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

By: rgz

rgz — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:31:43 +0000

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.

By: Jeremy Banks

Jeremy Banks — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:08:58 +0000

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.

By: Jeremy Banks

Jeremy Banks — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:02:13 +0000

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.