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Dating, Associated Press Style (TODO) 147Abbreviate the monthAs you can see from the above examples, all months more than 4 characters long are abbreviated to3 letters* with a dot. The warm months of May, June, and July are left unabbreviated.* Note: September is abbreviated to Sept. in AP style.The literal solutionThere’s only – and will always only be – 12 months, nine of which are actually affected. So withoutmuch thinking, we can match them literally with the use of alternationFind (January|February|March|April|August|September|October|November|December)Replace ???Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. This pattern makes a match, but what do we replace it with?Capturing the entire month’s name gives us a backreference to…the entire month’s name, which isunhelpful if we’re trying to abbreviate the month.We need to capture the first three characters of the long months and discard the rest. Let’s also usea bracekted character set to match (but not capture) the rest of the month’s name to discard:Find (Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|Aug|Sept|Oct|Nov|Dec)\w+ Replace\1.Try it on this list of dates:February 1, 2012January 19, 1999May 6, 2014March 22, 1788June 7, 1960Match just full datesThere’s one twist to AP Style dates: only dates that include a specific day use the abbreviated monthstyle.So our pattern needs to become more specific. It must not affect non-exact dates, such as:• The president last visited the state in October 1980