Print Last Months Name

[lynxus]

hey guys, I really just cant figure this out.. ( lil new to perl )

Anyway, i have a script that does several things to a database, However i need a dynamic name to print out..

IE:
Rather than

print "September";

I need perl to look at what month is it now. ( October ) then go back one and print that name instead.. IE: September

So summat like
$monthname = some code to do it.

print "$monthname";




Any Ideas out there ?


Cheers
in advace
Graham

 

[Rieekan]

Stick the months in a hash where the key is the month number, then just reference the value of the month minus one where you need it.

- George

 

[KevinADC]

using an already offset array is also very easy for this task:

my @months = qw(Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov);
my $last_month = (localtime())[4];
print $months[$last_month];

- Kevin, perl coder unexceptional!

 

[stevexff]

Kevin's solution also avoids the problem of what happens in January...

Steve

[small]"Every program can be reduced by one instruction, and every program has at least one bug. Therefore, any program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work." (Object:erlDesignPatterns)[/small]

 

[lynxus]

Thanks guys!

 

[rharsh]

As long as you're using an array, another approach would be to set up the array from Jan..Dec (rather than Dec, Jan..Nov) - then just subtract 1 from the month value that localtime returns.

January is month 0 (index '0' in the array), subtract 1 and you have -1. Since array index '-1' is the last element in the array, you would also get December.

my @months = qw(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec);
my $last_month = (localtime())[4] - 1;
print $months[$last_month];