And a 1 and a Tue

Question

Before yanking out the last handful of hair...
I have an integer between 0-11 (or 1-12 if you prefer, I'm flexible) that I would like to use in some clever way (this is where you come in) to return a three-character string object (or string buffer object, I'm flexible) representing the corresponding month of the year ("Oct" for example).
I have another integer between 0-6 (or 1-7) that I would like to similarly use to get a three-digit day of the week ("Tue" for example).
I have read, re-read, and re-re-read the API for Date, DateFormat, SimpleDateFormat and Calendar objects; I've experimented with lots of different code and I can't seem to do this one simple little thing.
What I want is function something like this:
String getMonth(int monthValue) {
if (monthValue==0) {
return "Jan";
} else if (monthValue==1) {
return "Feb";
.... and so on
Do I have to write my own code to do this???
Thanks

Answer 1

public String monthString (int month) {
    return (DateFormatSymbols.getShortMonths())[month];