NAME

lunar (version 2.1) - a calendar conversion utility

SYNTAX

lunar [ -h ] [ -5 ] [ -b ] [ -i ] [ -l ] year month day [ hour ]

DESCRIPTION

The program performs date conversion between the Gregorian Solar Calendar (SC) and the Chinese Lunar Calendar (LC). Given a date in either calendar, the program also outputs the corresponding "shengxiao" (animal of the year) and "ganzhi" characters. The date range currently covered is from about 1900 A.D. to 2049 A.D.

For the sake of convenience, we choose the convention such that the solar and lunar year numbers of the first day of a lunar year are the same. For example, SC 1991.2.15 is LC 1991.1.1, while SC 1991.2.14 is LC 1990.12.30. Moreover, we choose the convention such that the solar and lunar hour numbers (in 24-hour clock) of a date are the same, although a lunar day starts at 23:00 of a solar day. This means that SC 1991.2.15.23 is LC 1991.1.2.23, while SC 1991.2.16.0 is LC 1991.1.2.0, and SC 1991.2.16.1 is LC 1991.1.2.1.

The standard time of the Lunar Calendar is Beijing (Hong Kong) Standard Time, not GMT. Be sure to adjust appropriately for other time zones and "Day-light Saving Time".

In the Lunar Calendar, a normal year has 12 months, and a leap year (run-nian) has 13 months, where the extra month is called a "leap month" (run-yue). For example, the leap month that follows immediately the 6-th lunar month is called the 6-th leap month. A (leap) month is either a short or long one, which has 29 or 30 days respectively.

There are 10 gan's and 12 zhi's. The ganzhi labeling of the year, month, day and hour of a date is a member of the Cartesian product GxGxGxG, where G = {1,2,...,60}. For example, "jia-zi" is 1, "yi-chou" is 2, and so on. The ganzhi of the j-th leap month is the same as that of the j-th month.

The possible options are

-b: output ganzhi in special "bitmap" characters.
-h: output hanzi or Simplified Chinese characters encoded in (highest-bit-set) GB code.
-5: output Traditional Chinese characters encoded in (highest-bit-set) BIG5 code.
-i: convert a lunar date to solar date. The default is to convert a solar date to a lunar date.
-l: indicate the month is a lunar leap month. This option is meaningful only when the "-i" option is used.

COPYRIGHT

All rights reserved. Permission to copy and distribute verbatim copies of the source code and accompanied documents for non-commercial purposes is granted, but changing them is not allowed. There is absolutely no warranty for this program.

AUTHORS

Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The special "bitmap" file "lunar.bitmap" was contributed by Weimin Liu.

Special thanks to Hwei Chen Ti who extended the tables from 2001 to 2049.

BUGS

Bug reports and comments should be sent to Ricky.Yeung@Eng.Sun.Com or lee@umunhum.stanford.edu.

DISCLAIMER

This software has no connection with our employers.