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25 lines
817 B
Markdown
25 lines
817 B
Markdown
# Get The Names Of The Month
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Ruby's `Date` object has a `MONTHNAMES` constant that returns an array of names
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of the month. You'd think that means the array contains 12 items. However, the
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size of that array is 13.
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```ruby
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> Date::MONTHNAMES
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=> [nil, "January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December"]
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```
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Notice it has all 12 months, plus an initial value of `nil`.
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This is because it allows us to more intuitive access a month by it's index
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without having to do a little subtraction. If I want to know what the 9th month
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is, I can do an array access for `9`.
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```ruby
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> Date::MONTHNAMES[9]
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=> "September"
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```
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Because arrays in Ruby use 0-based indexing, without this baked in `nil` value,
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you'd instead get `"October"` when passing in `9`.
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