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While working with a CJ run reports script i needed to convert “month name” into “month number” so i could store it in the database in date format. After doing some cleaning stuff i was ending with the month name, a three character string as “Jan”,”Mar”,”Apr” etc. Here is the quick work around i applied to get the month number automatically from the month name.

$month_name = "Jan"; //which i get from file name (Range_from_1_Jan_2009_to_3_Mar_2009.txt)
$month_number = "";

for($i=1;$i<=12;$i++){
	if(strtolower(date("M", mktime(0, 0, 0, $i, 1, 0))) == strtolower($month_name)){
		$month_number = $i;
		break;
	}
}

Now as php snippet code line 5 date(“M”, mktime(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0))) returns a three letter represantion of month name i get month “1″ if i pass $month_name=”Jan” and so on. If i had full month name like “January” i could make it work by replacing “M” with “F” where “F” format parameter is a full represantion of year name.

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