xorl has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question: ⭐ (dates and times)

I'm sure this is a dumb question, but I can't seem to find the answer. I have a variable that contains a month name i.e. "October" I want to change that to the number i.e. "10". Is there an easy way of doing this. My only thought was 
if ($var eq "January") { $var=1; } elsif ($var eq "Feburary") ...

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but this seems rather long and tedious.
Thanks!

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Convert month name to number⭐
by japhy (Canon) on Jul 11, 2001 at 00:24 UTC
    You want a hash. 
    %mon2num = qw(
  jan 1  feb 2  mar 3  apr 4  may 5  jun 6
  jul 7  aug 8  sep 9  oct 10 nov 11 dec 12
);

print $mon2num{ lc substr($month, 0, 3) };

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    That works for "JANUARY", "Mar", "decemb.", "oct", and many other variants.
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[d/l]
      Great implementation japhy! A word of warning to the wise that if you plan on using this with POSIX mktime and friends you'll want to subtract 1 from the month number (e.g. January = 0, December = 11).
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Re: Convert month name to number
by particle (Vicar) on Jul 11, 2001 at 00:51 UTC
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