Question

I am playing with Python’s calendar module that’s in the standard library. Basically I need a list of all days of a month, like so:

>>> import calendar
>>> calobject = calendar.monthcalendar(2012, 10)
>>> print calobject
[[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], [8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14], [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21], [22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28], [29, 30, 31, 0, 0, 0, 0]]

Now what I also need are the names of the months and days in a specific locale. I didn’t find a way to get these from the calobject itself – but I was able to get them like so:

>>> import calendar
>>> calobject = calendar.LocaleTextCalendar(calendar.MONDAY, 'de_DE')
>>> calobject.formatmonth(2012, 10)
'    Oktober 2012\nMo Di Mi Do Fr Sa So\n 1  2  3  4  5  6  7\n 8  9 10 11 12 13 14\n15 16 17 18 19 20 21\n22 23 24 25 26 27 28\n29 30 31\n'

So Oktober is the de_DE name for october. Fine. The information must be there. I’m wondering if I can access that month name somehow on a plain calendar object instead of a calendar.LocaleTextCalendar object. The first example (with the list) is really what I need and I don’t like the idea to create two calendar objects to get localized names.

Anyone got a smart idea?

Answer 1

This is from the source code of the calendar module:

def formatmonthname(self, theyear, themonth, width, withyear=True):
    with TimeEncoding(self.locale) as encoding:
        s = month_name[themonth]
        if encoding is not None:
            s = s.decode(encoding)
        if withyear:
            s = "%s %r" % (s, theyear)
        return s.center(width)

TimeEncoding and month_name can be imported from the calendar module. This gives the following method:

from calendar import TimeEncoding, month_name

def get_month_name(month_no, locale):
    with TimeEncoding(locale) as encoding:
        s = month_name[month_no]
        if encoding is not None:
            s = s.decode(encoding)
        return s

print get_month_name(3, "nb_NO.UTF-8")

For me the decode step is not needed, simply printing month_name[3] in the TimeEncoding context prints “mars”, which is norwegian for “march”.

For weekdays there’s a similar method using the day_name and day_abbr dicts:

from calendar import TimeEncoding, day_name, day_abbr

def get_day_name(day_no, locale, short=False):
    with TimeEncoding(locale) as encoding:
        if short:
            s = day_abbr[day_no]
        else:
            s = day_name[day_no]
        if encoding is not None:
            s = s.decode(encoding)
        return s