I am trying to create a function that can convert a month number to an abbreviated month name or an abbreviated month name to a month number. I thought this might be a common question but I could not find it online.

I was thinking about the calendar module. I see that to convert from month number to abbreviated month name you can just do calendar.month_abbr[num]. I do not see a way to go the other direction though. Would creating a dictionary for converting the other direction be the best way to handle this? Or is there a better way to go from month name to month number and vice versa?

Create a reverse dictionary using the calendar module (which, like any module, you will need to import):

{month: index for index, month in enumerate(calendar.month_abbr) if month}

In Python versions before 2.7, due to dict comprehension syntax not being supported in the language, you would have to do

dict((month, index) for index, month in enumerate(calendar.month_abbr) if month)