⭐ in reply to Convert month name to number

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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Re: Answer: Convert month name to number
by RhetTbull (Curate) on Jul 11, 2001 at 00:56 UTC
    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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