#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

{
   my $mn = 3; 

   my $month = (qw(January Feburary March April May June July August S
+eptember October November December))[$mn];

   print $month, "\n";
}
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{ 
   my $mn = 3;  
 
   my $month = (qw(January Feburary March April May June July August S
+eptember October November December))[$mn]; 
 
   print $month, "\n"; 
}
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Be aware that at least in 5.5.3 and earlier, this list is split at runtime causing some performance penalty if invoked repeatedly. You can do the split once at compile time by wrapping a subroutine inside a BEGIN block:

BEGIN {
  my @month_names = qw(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
+);
  sub month_name_for {
    my $number = shift;
    die if $number < 0 or $number > $#month_names or $number != int($n
+umber);
    $month_names[$number];
  }
}
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In advance of you providing answers to jcwren's questions, I have one sort of suggestion to make that I think will work for a number of setups. warning : it involves a relatively complex data structure (to fully grok it, you'll need to read up on how to use references in Perl!)

Suppose you've got a runtime variable that selects the language, what you can do is have a hash, whose keys are the names of the various languages, and whose values are *references to* anonymous arrays, which hold the names of the months in that language.

The syntax below is not sacrosanct, personally if I could figure out right at this moment how to use the qw(...) to get the names of the months without all the fiddly quotes, I'd be happier, but the following seems suitable for small to medium-sized projects.

Here's a code snippet (that won't work cut n' paste! =):

use strict; # =)

my %months = (        'English'=> ['January', 'February' ... ],
            'French'=> ['Janvier', 'Fevrier', ... ],
            'Italian'=> ['gennaio', 'febbraio', ...],
        #etc ...
        );
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# $language is set at run time and would be one of 'English', 
# 'Italian' etc. -- the keys of your $months hash
# also assumes $month_number ranges from 1 to 12; if it's 0 to 11, eli
+minate the '-1'

my $month_name = $month{$language}[$month_number-1];
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use strict;
use Date::Manip;

my $d=ParseDate("today");
foreach my $l (qw(English French Swedish German Spanish Italian)) {
  Date_Init("Language=$l");
  print "$l: ".UnixDate($d, "%F\n");
}
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English: Wednesday, September 27, 2000
French: mercredi, septembre 27, 2000
Swedish: Onsdag, September 27, 2000
German: Mittwoch, September 27, 2000
Spanish: Miercoles, Septiembre 27, 2000
Italian: Mercoledi, Settembre 27, 2000
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• I did the ParseDate before changing the language from English (the default), because otherwise I would have had to change "today" to each language in turn.
• I couldn't find a way for it to change the format according to each language's conventions, as mentioned by ar0n.
• If all you need are month names, Date::Manip may be overkill, because it is a very big module. But if you need dates in general, it might be worth a try.

--ZZamboni

use POSIX qw(locale_h strftime);   # arturo's fix
use locale;   # not necessarily needed in *this* case

# locale_h above and the setlocale() calls below
# are only needed in normal circumstances if you 
# want to work outside of your machine's default 
# locale.

for $locale (qw{ en fr de }) {
   setlocale(LC_TIME, $locale);

   for (0..11) {
      print "Locale $locale\n---------\n";
 
      # strftime is now localized to $locale
      print strftime("%B", 0, 0, 0, 1, $_, 96);

      print "\n";
   }
}
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Note: Code samples are for conceptual use only and generally are not meant to be cut/pasted into a production application. Always 'use strict', have a thorough understanding of the code you use, and check the return values of functions and handle errors according to your needs. - Fastolfe

Interesting ... when I do

use POSIX qw(strftime locale_h);
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I get ":locale_h" is not exported by the POSIX module at locale.pl

But when I do

use POSIX qw(locale_h strftime);
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Everything's fine ..

So, who knows what's going on? Is this some kinda weird bug, or is it documented behavior?

Philosophy can be made out of anything -- or less

I don't think it is documented, and it is due to trying to grandfather something in.

POSIX.pm has an import method which is a wrapper around Exporter which is meant to allow things matching /^\w+_h$/ to have ":" appended making them tags. If you look at Exporter's documentation, tags for groups only work if the first element is a tag. So in your first example the second element is turned into a tag, and Exporter barfs on it not being exported. In your second example all works.

For a hack to fix it, find POSIX.pm, search for "import", and add a sort of @list before it calls Exporter's import function.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use XML::Simple;

my $xml = XMLin("./months.xml");

for my $lang (qw(en nl de fr)) {
        print $xml->{$lang}{month}[8],"\n";
}
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