Converting Month Number to Month Name In Java!

import java.text.*;

String getMonthForInt(int m) {
    String month = "invalid";
    DateFormatSymbols dfs = new DateFormatSymbols();
    String[] months = dfs.getMonths();
    if (m >= 0 && m <= 11 ) {
        month = months[m];
    }
    return month;
}

27 Replies to “Converting Month Number to Month Name In Java!”

1. Great Example. I was looking for this everywhere. 🙂
   thanks

2. This is great. How did you find it?

3. God, I really can’t remember now. It was three years ago! Maybe off the web somewhere or perhaps trawling the standard documentation. I can’t believe I couldn’t find out how to do it for so long!

   Calendar and GregorianCalendar are so big and confusing I think I kept thinking it was in there somewhere. I really hate dates in java. Not that they are much fun in any language. But java is the worst.

   I’m not sure I think much of that code with hindsight. Perhaps something a bit more like:

   import java.text.DateFormatSymbols;
   public String getMonth(int month) {
       return new DateFormatSymbols().getMonths()[month];
   }
   

4. Thank you ,this was really helpful

5. Too good…:)
   I used the boring switch statement before..i ll replace it with this1
   thanks!

6. Hey this is really good!!! was tired of array and switch statments..

7. Thank You guy..
   U save my life hehe
   that’s realy realy good….

   thanks you again
   =)

8. Almost 5 years since you wrote this posting and still useful. I must confese i was tempted to write my own solution but now i’ll use that time in seeing the chess tournament games!!! : )

   Thanks Thomas

9. My Code was wrote in spanish……returns month name in spanish if p_idioma = 0 or english if p_idioma = 1

       /**
        * Método que retorna el nombre del mes actual del sistema
        * @param p_idioma Entero que determina el idioma en que se retornara la respuesta (0 -> español, 1-> ingles)
        * @return Nombre del mes actual en el idioma determinado en el parametro
        */
       public static String getNombreMes(int p_idioma) throws Exception{
           String[][] mesNombre = {
                                   {"Enero","January"},{"Febrero","Febrary"},{"Marzo","March"},{"Abril","April"},
                                   {"Mayo","May"},{"Junio","June"},{"July","Julio"},{"Agosto","August"},
                                   {"Septiembre","September"},{"Octubre","October"},{"Noviembre","November"},{"Diciembre","December"},
                                   };
           /** se verifica que el parametro idioma sea valido **/
           if(p_idioma  1) throw new Exception("Error al intentar obtener el nombre del mes con el código de idioma " + p_idioma);
           /** se calcula el mes del sistema */
           Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
           /** se obtiene de la matris el nombre del mes **/
           String mes = mesNombre[cal.get(Calendar.MONTH)][p_idioma];
           /** se retorna el nombre del mes **/
           return mes;  
       }
   

10. Very good and useful example.

11. Very useful indeed…thanks

12. Absolutely Fantastic Code , Thanks alot, & give more nice codes like this.

13. Thank you. It is very useful and handy

14. Thanks av been looking for this

15. your code dnt run

16. Thank U v m

17. Thanks a ton 🙂 cannot imagine a world where we don’t get such articles easily available for our use. You guys are great.

18. Hi,

    Thanks for the beautiful code.
    Sharing something I found…Calendar Object in Java 6 have methods to show month.

    calendar.getDisplayName(Calendar.MONTH, Calendar.LONG, Locale.ENGLISH);

    I hope it will work too.

    Regards
    Ravi

19. You could use the VM built in function called String.format

    take a look at this example:

    Date date = new Date();
    System.out.println(String.format(“%1$tB / %1$tY”,date));

    Program output: December / 2011

    it’s already conditioned to use Locales getting the default one from your computer.
    you can also specify a custom Locale there..

    Obs.: it works out with Date and Calendar as well

20. After 8 years……….still in demand!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Thanx dude

21. Really simple. No words to thank.

22. I’m noob in Java but i found this one…

    calendar.getDisplayName(Calendar.MONTH, Calendar.LONG, Locale.ENGLISH)
    this actually returns You string with name of the month in English that You desire 🙂

    works for me (change from my language to English)

23. I would hope that 11 years later they’ve come up with something better 🙂

    Looks like getDisplayName was added to Calendar in Java 1.6 (December 2006).

    I always thought there should be something on Calendar/GregorianCalendar …

    Good find!

24. nice piece of code.

25. very nice yar good Thanks a lot

26. For more Java Date and Calendar Examples and Conversions please go through this blog http://adnjavainterview.blogspot.in/2014/08/java-date-and-calendar-examples.html.

27. Here is a clean code version for getting the months with an index. This will throw an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException when the number sent in isn’t between 0 and 11:
    
public static String getMonthName(int monthIndex) {
return new DateFormatSymbols().getMonths()[monthIndex].toString();
}

    You can also have a better formatted error like this:

    public static String getMonthName(int monthIndex) {
//since this is zero based, 11 = December
if (monthIndex > 11 ) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException(monthIndex + " is not a valid month index.");
}
return new DateFormatSymbols().getMonths()[monthIndex].toString();
}

    Thanks for the original code, it was really helpful.