How do I get a month name like Jan or January from a date?

[tch1121]

please support zoned::month_string()

[BurntSushi]

A method like this is specifically not available because it is quite sensitive to locale. And, for the most part, Jiff specifically opts out of doing anything with locale. Instead, that's left to crates like icu to handle. Jiff specifically offers integration with icu via jiff-icu. The crate docs have examples for how to localize dates. As I understand it (and I could be wrong, icu's API is vast), there is no simple method to get the month name.

With all that said, there are two corners of Jiff that specifically eschew localization. One is its "friendly" duration format. The other is the jiff::fmt::strtime APIs. The strtime APIs are meant to provide a simplistic means for ad hoc formatting and parsing of datetimes, and they generally stick to English words and customs with respect to formatting and parsing.

All of Jiff's datetime types provide convenient access to strptime and strftime APIs, including Zoned. Which means you can do this:

use jiff::civil;

fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let zdt =
        civil::date(2025, 7, 15).at(17, 30, 0, 0).in_tz("America/New_York")?;
    println!("{}", zdt.strftime("%b"));
    println!("{}", zdt.strftime("%B"));

    Ok(())
}

Which has this output:

$ cargo r -q
Jul
July

It might seem like a small step to just add a method to do this for you instead of going through some baroque formatting API to do it, but this is very intentional. It avoids biasing Jiff too much (more than it already does, which is not a zero amount) toward a English-centric view of datetimes.