[Tutor] date formatter

[Kent Johnson]

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 1:34 AM, Christopher Spears
<cspears2002 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ok, here is the working version of my program.  Thanks for all of the advice:
>
> #!/usr/bin/python
>
> import time
>
> class date_format(object):

This is a  bit of a misnomer, you aren't formatting the date, you are
parsing it.

>        def __init__(self, month, day, year):
>                month_dict = {("jan","january") : 1,
>                              ("feb","february") :2,
>                              ("mar", "march") : 3,
>                              ("apr", "april") : 4,
>                              ("may",) : 5,
>                              ("jun", "june") : 6,
>                              ("jul", "july") : 7,
>                              ("aug", "august") : 8,
>                              ("sep", "september") : 9,
>                              ("oct", "october"): 10,
>                              ("nov", "november"): 11,
>                              ("dec", "december"): 12
>                              }
>
>                try:
>                        month_number = int(month)
>                except ValueError:
>                        for eachKey in month_dict.keys():
>                                if month.lower() in eachKey:
>                                        month_number = month_dict[eachKey]
>                                        break

month_dict might as well be a list, you aren't using the dict-ness of it at all.

                months = [ (("jan","january") , 1),
 ...                             ]

               try:
                       month_number = int(month)
               except ValueError:
                       for names, number in months():
                               if month.lower() in names:
                                       month_number = number
                                       break
                               else:
                                       month_number = 0

You might be interested in this project:
http://code-bear.com/code/parsedatetime/

Kent