month name to month number and vice versa in python

Question

I am trying to create a function that can convert a month number to an abbreviated month name or an abbreviated month name to a month number. I thought this might be a common question but I could not find it online.

I was thinking about the calendar module. I see that to convert from month number to abbreviated month name you can just do calendar.month_abbr[num]. I do not see a way to go the other direction though. Would creating a dictionary for converting the other direction be the best way to handle this? Or is there a better way to go from month name to month number and vice versa?

Answer 1

Creating a reverse dictionary would be a reasonable way to do this, because it's pretty simple:

dict((v,k) for k,v in enumerate(calendar.month_abbr))

or in recent versions of Python (2.7+ I believe)

{(v,k) for k,v in enumerate(calendar.month_abbr)}