How Do You Spell the Names of the Months?
One construct that I’ve seen (and used) a lot in Perl is a hash that maps month abbreviations to numeric values that can be fed to POSIX::strftime:
our %months = (
"jan" => 0, "feb" => 1, "mar" => 3, ...
);
This is useful for parsing log files and such. It works, it’s quick and easy, and it doesn’t require a whole tree of dependent modules (which are always on the wrong side of the Internet) to be installed.
But what’s always bugged me is that this is the sort of thing that the machine ought to know already. And besides, it’s US-centric: what if the person running the script is in a non-English-speaking country?
Fortunately, I18N::Langinfo knows the names of the months. Read More