How to initialize a table of months.

[John Zenger]

On Apr 15, 9:30 pm, "Steven W. Orr" <ste... at syslang.net> wrote:
> I'm reading a logfile with a timestamp at the begging of each line, e.g.,
>
> Mar 29 08:29:00
>
> I want to call datetime.datetim() whose arg2 is a number between 1-12 so I
> have to convert the month to an integer.
> I wrote this, but I have a sneaky suspicion there's a better way to do it.
>
> mons = {'Jan':1, 'Feb':2, 'Mar':3, 'Apr':4, 'May':5, 'Jun':6,
>          'Jul':7, 'Aug':8, 'Sep':9, 'Oct':10, 'Nov':11, 'Dec':12 }
>
> def mon2int( mon ):
>      global mons
>      return mons[mon]
>
> Is there a generator expression or a list comprehension thingy that would
> be *betterer*? (I realize it's probably not that important but I find lots
> of value in learning all the idioms.)
>
> TIA


Well, I think you want time.strptime.

>>> time.strptime("Mar 29 08:29:00", "%b %d %H:%M:%S")
(1900, 3, 29, 8, 29, 0, 3, 88, -1)

See http://docs.python.org/lib/node85.html

However, if strptime did not exist, your dictionary solution is fine
-- a tad bit slow, but easy and maintainable, which is worth a lot.