How do I get the current month name?

To get the current month name from the system we can use java.util.Calendar class. The Calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH) returns the month value as an integer starting from 0 as the first month and 11 as the last month. This mean January equals to 0, February equals to 1 and December equals to 11.

Let’s see the code below:

package org.kodejava.example.util;

import java.util.Calendar;

public class GetMonthNameExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String[] monthName = {"January", "February",
                "March", "April", "May", "June", "July",
                "August", "September", "October", "November",
                "December"};

        Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
        String month = monthName[cal.get(Calendar.MONTH)];

        System.out.println("Month name: " + month);
    }
}

On the first line inside the main method we declare an array of string that keep our month names. Next we get the integer value of the current month and at the last step we look for the month name inside our previously defined array.

The example result of this program is:

Month name: September

The better way to get the month names or week names is to use the java.text.DateFormatSymbols class. The example on using this class can be found on the following links: How do I get a list of month names? and How do I get a list of weekday names?.

Wayan

2 Comments

  1. Why don’t you use:

    Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
    String dayName = calendar.getDisplayName(Calendar.MONTH, Calendar.LONG, Locale.US);
    System.out.println("dayName = " + dayName);
    
    Reply
    • Hi Chariya,

      Yes you can do it that way to make things simpler. In this example I was trying to introduce the Calendar.MONTH constant of the calendar class.

      Reply

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