last revisions: 11-7-2001

Calender Handling in Libeth 0.40

This document contains draft segments of two other documents. It is does not in itself comprise a complete document nor specification. This document is posted to solicit feedback on the changes under consideration herein.

estrftime in LibEth Calendar Codes 0.20

The 0.2 version of the calendar conversion utilities that are a part of libeth will feature an extensively reworked version of the estrftime function. The new version will handle locale support by making preemptive interpretation of the extended conversion specifiers of standard strftime.

The following table illustrates the interpretations proposed:

Attributes of Ethiopian Names

The conversion specifiers require only conversion between numeral systems in most cases. %Om and %Oy specify a change of numerals systems and do not require priori conversion into the Ethiopian calendar system. To force dates into an Ethiopic context the 0.2 interpreter will recognize hyphen, '-', which will force a date conversion before the token replacement. Dates already in the Ethiopic context will be left unmodified and not converted into the Western system. Recognized - extensions will be:

Additional specifiers are defined for properties of Ethiopic dates believed to be useful for calendar programming:

Calendrical Scripting Extension to the LiveGe'ez Remote Processing Protocol

4.3.1 The Date Conversion Attribute

The date conversion attribute is analogous to the day, month and year CGI parameters of Subsection 3.4. The difference in using a single "date" attribute is that the day, month and year attribute values are grouped in a comma separated list to form the "date" attribute value. The calendar system of the date numeric values may be included as the last item of the list. The calendar system of the date attribute alternatively be indicated with a "calIn" attribute, the first form however is the preferred:

<LIVEGEEZ date="DATE">
<LIVEGEEZ date="DATE" lang="LANG">
<LIVEGEEZ date="DATE" lang="LANG" calOut="CALSYS">
<LIVEGEEZ date="DATE" lang="LANG" calOut="CALSYS" format="FORMAT">
<LIVEGEEZ date="DATE" lang="LANG" calOut="CALSYS" prop="PROPERTY">
<LIVEGEEZ date="DATE" lang="LANG" calOut="CALSYS" (format="FORMAT" | prop="PROPERTY") name="NAME">


DATE    :=  "today"
         |  day "," month "," year
         |  day "," month "," year "," CALSYS
         ;  day, month, and year tokens were defined in Table 3.3.1
         ;  CALSYS here corresponds to the calIn parameter.
         ;  Ethiopic calendar is assumed when CALSYS is omitted.

FORMAT  := <a valid estrftime format> ;

PROP    := "day"
         | "eday"
         | "eyear"
         | "day-name"
         | "month"
         | "month-name"
         | "holiday"
         | "year"
         | "eyear"
         | "year-name"
         | "tsom" | "tsom-minor"
         | "tsom-major"
         | "tabot"
         | "month-star"
         | "year-star"
         | "sid-star-day"
         | "sid-market-day"
         ;

NAME    := [A-Za-z0-9]+ ;

The "name" attribute is another new introduction. The name attribute allows us to make future references to a LiveGe'ez date declaration. This is convenient for calendrical scripting as we do not have to respecify the date parameter and other initial attributes each time the same date is to be used. After the initial declaration, modifications made to a named date (such as a lang or calOut settings) will remain for future use.

Date Properties

The "prop" attribute is a shortcut to composing a date format where the specifiers can be difficult to remember. Likewise the "prop" and "format" attributes can not be used together. The "prop" attribute may be thought of as invoking a method on a date object. For example: <LIVEGEEZ date="29,4,1991,et" name="day1"> instantiates a date object named "day1". Then <LIVEGEEZ name="day1" lang="gez" prop="day-name"> would be equivalent to day1.day_name( "gez" ) which would print the weekday name for 29/4/1991 in the Ethiopic calendar system in the Ge'ez language.

Examples: