is there anything in javascript that can convert "August" to 8 ?

Question

i need to convert Monthname to integer of that month (and want to avoid a big switch statement). any ideas?

Answer 1

You can create an array(name/vale pairs) in your code since it's only 12 months and write a function to do it.

var months = {August: 8};

Answer 2

Just create a date in that month, parse it, and use getMonth() like this

function convertMonthNameToNumber(monthName) {
    var myDate = new Date(monthName + " 1, 2000");
    var monthDigit = myDate.getMonth();
    return isNaN(monthDigit) ? 0 : (monthDigit + 1);
}

alert(convertMonthNameToNumber("August"));     //returns 8
alert(convertMonthNameToNumber("Augustsss"));  //returns 0 (or whatever you change the default too)
alert(convertMonthNameToNumber("Aug"));        //returns 8 - Bonus!
alert(convertMonthNameToNumber("AuGust"));     //returns 8 - Casing is irrelevant!

Answer 3

var monthtbl = { 'January': 1, 'February': 2, /* ... */, 'August', 8, /* ... */, 'December': 12 };
// ...
var monthNumber = monthtbl[monthName];

edit but do it the way @Chad suggests :-)

If you wanted to make it insensitive to alphabetic case, you'd create the object ("monthtbl") all lower-case and then use

var monthNumber = monthtbl[monthName.toLowerCase()];

Answer 4

Another option just to throw out there, you could use an array and $.inArry(), like this:

var months = ["January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December"];
function getMonth(name) {
  return $.inArray(name, months) +1;
}

Though judging by your previous questions, pulling the date directly from the jquery UI datepicker object may be much easier.

Answer 5

function monthToNumber(month) {
    return new Date(Date.parse("1 "+month)).getMonth()+1;
}