Distribution · time

Date::Names

Works

The names of the months and weekdays in fourteen languages — full, abbreviated, in the case and truncation you ask for — and the reverse lookup from a name to its number.

Version: 2.3.2 zef:tbrowder
Depends: Abbreviations
License: Artistic-2.0
Its own test suite: 19 files, green
Checked: 2026-09-14 against Raku++ 3.28.0 and Rakudo 2026.08
Where it lives: raku.land · source

Install it #

$ rakupp install Date::Names

zef install Date::Names writes the same store; either installer leaves the module usable by both engines.

What it is for #

A Date knows that it is month 9 and weekday 1, and nothing more; the word September is not in the core, in any language. This distribution is the table — English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian (both written forms), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Indonesian — with one object per language answering mon(9) and dow(1), in full or cut to a length, and going the other way from a name to its number. It is the data under Date::Calendar::Strftime's %A and %B, and four distributions depend on it.

Names in and out #

File

use Date::Names;

my $en = Date::Names.new;
say $en.mon(9), ' ', $en.mon(9, 3), ' ', $en.dow(1), ' ', $en.dow(7, 2);
say $en.mon2num('September'), ' ', $en.dow2num('Sat');
for <de fr es nl uk> -> $lang {
    my $d = Date::Names.new(:$lang);
    say "$lang: ", $d.mon(9), ' / ', $d.dow(1), ' / ', $d.mon(9, 3);
}
say Date::Names.new(lang => 'de').mfull.join(', ');
say (try { $en.mon(13) }) // $!.^name;
say (try { Date::Names.new(lang => 'xx') }) // $!.^name;

Output

September Sep Monday Su
9 6
de: September / Montag / Sep
fr: septembre / lundi / sep
es: septiembre / lunes / sep
nl: september / maandag / sep
uk: вересень / понеділок / вер
Januar, Februar, März, April, Mai, Juni, Juli, August, September, Oktober, November, Dezember
X::TypeCheck::Binding::Parameter
X::NoSuchSymbol

Months are 1 to 12 and weekdays 1 to 7 with Monday first, as Date counts them, so $en.dow($date.day-of-week) needs no arithmetic. The second argument truncates to that many characters; mfull and dfull hand over the whole list for a language. A month number outside the range is refused by the signature — the where clause on it — rather than answered with something.

The one thing to know #

Each language is its own unit, found by name at run time. Date::Names.new builds Date::Names::de out of the string de, and a language that is not shipped is a symbol that does not exist — the last line above, and X::NoSuchSymbol is the right answer to it. Under the Raku++ 3.28.0 release that lookup came back as an undefined value instead of a failure, and the object was built around nothing: every mon and dow on it was Any, with no error until something tried to print one. The engine now answers a missing package symbol the way Rakudo does, so the mistake is loud again.

The names are the module's data, and its data has the conventions of each language: French and Spanish months are lowercase, German and English are capitalised, and :case on the constructor changes that only if you ask.