How to parse a month name (string) to an integer f

Question

I need to be able to compare some month names I have in an array.

It would be nice if there were some direct way like:

Month.toInt("January") > Month.toInt("May")

My Google searching seems to suggest the only way is to write your own method, but this seems like a common enough problem that I would think it would have been already implemented in .Net, anyone done this before?

Answer 1

You can use an enum of months:

public enum Month
{
    January,
    February,
    // (...)
    December,
}    

public Month ToInt(Month Input)
{
    return (int)Enum.Parse(typeof(Month), Input, true));
}

I am not 100% certain on the syntax for enum.Parse(), though.

Answer 2

If you use the DateTime.ParseExact()-method that several people have suggested, you should carefully consider what you want to happen when the application runs in a non-English environment!

In Denmark, which of ParseExact("Januar", ...) and ParseExact("January", ...) should work and which should fail?

That will be the difference between CultureInfo.CurrentCulture and CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.

Answer 3

If you are using c# 3.0 (or above) you can use extenders

Answer 4

You can use the DateTime.Parse method to get a DateTime object and then check its Month property. Do something like this:

int month = DateTime.Parse("1." + monthName + " 2008").Month;

The trick is to build a valid date to create a DateTime object.

Answer 5

What I did was to use SimpleDateFormat to create a format string, and parse the text to a date, and then retrieve the month from that. The code is below:

int year = 2012 \\or any other year
String monthName = "January" \\or any other month
SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yyyy");
int monthNumber = format.parse("01-" + monthName + "-" + year).getMonth();

Answer 6

And answering this seven years after the question was asked, it is possible to do this comparison using built-in methods:

Month.toInt("January") > Month.toInt("May")

becomes

Array.FindIndex( CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.MonthNames,
                 t => t.Equals("January", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)) >
Array.FindIndex( CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.MonthNames,
                 t => t.Equals("May", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))

Which can be refactored into an extension method for simplicity. The following is a LINQPad example (hence the Dump() method calls):

void Main()
{
    ("January".GetMonthIndex() > "May".GetMonthIndex()).Dump();
    ("January".GetMonthIndex() == "january".GetMonthIndex()).Dump();
    ("January".GetMonthIndex() < "May".GetMonthIndex()).Dump();
}

public static class Extension {
    public static int GetMonthIndex(this string month) {
        return Array.FindIndex( CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.MonthNames,
                         t => t.Equals(month, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase));
    }
}

With output:

False
True
True