[Tutor] date formatter

[Benoit Thiell]

On Thu, 7 Aug 2008, bob gailer wrote:

> Christopher Spears wrote:
>> Hey,
>> 
>> I'm working on a problem out of Core Python Programming (2nd Edition). 
>> Basically, I'm creating a class that formats dates.  Here is what I have so 
>> far:
>> 
>
> Consider reformatting the month_dict so each name and abbreviation is a key. 
> Then you can just look up the potential key rather than looping thru all the 
> keys. That is what dictionaries are for!:
>
> 	month_dict = {"jan" : 1,
> 		      "january" : 1,
> 		      "feb" : 2,
>                     "february" :2, etc ...}
>       ...
> 	except ValueError:
> 		 if month.lower() in month_dict:
>                     month = month_dict[month.lower()]
> 		 else:
> 		      month = ""
>
> The dict function is also handy here:
>
> 	month_dict = dict(
>                      jan = 1,
> 		       january = 1,
> 		       feb = 2,
>                      february = 2, etc ...)

Dear Christopher,

Instead of multiplying the keys for each possible version of the written 
month, I would rather have:

month_dict = {"jan":1,
               "feb":2, ...}

and have:
written_month = written_month[:3].lower()
if written_month in month_dict:
     # do something

Regards,
Benoit.