Figure out month number from month abbrievation

[Azolex]

Bill wrote:
> Hello --
> I'm parsing the output of the finger command, and was wondering
> something...If I'm given a month abbrievation (such as "Jan"), what's
> the best way to figure out the month number?

> I see that there's
> something called "month_abbr" in the calendar module.  However, when I
> try to do calendar.month_abbr.index("Jan"), I get "_localized_month
> instance has no attribute 'index'."  So it seems that month_abbr isn't
> a regular list.  I'm currently doing it this way:
> 
> def month_number(monthabbr):
>     """Return the month number for monthabbr; e.g. "Jan" -> 1."""
>     for index, day in enumerate(calendar.month_abbr):
>         if day == monthabbr:
>             return index
> 
> which works well enough but isn't very clever.  I'm pretty new to
> Python; what am I missing here?
> Thanks -- Bill.

well, you can define the equivalent of your function with

month_number = list(calendar.month_abbr).index

or else

"! Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec".split().index