4.2.3 Calendar Parsing

The calendar parsing module can be invoked as (use-modules (combine_scm parse)).

The most useful function in the module is parse-date. It takes as arguments a date string and an output format. The date string is parsed as well as possible in descending order of preference for format in case of ambiguity. The function returns the date triplet (or other such representation) suggested by the format string.

The supported format strings are the words in the function names of the form calendar-xxxx-from-absolute that would take the place of the xxxx. See section Calendar Functions, for more information.

The parsing of the date string depends on the setting of a couple of variables. Look inside the file ‘parse.scm’ for details. The list parse-date-expected-order lists the order in which the parser should look for the year, month, and day in case of ambiguity. The list parse-date-method-preference give more general format preferences, such as 8-digit, delimited, or a word for the month and the expected incoming calendar.

Here are a few examples of passing a date and putting it out in some formats:

guile> (use-modules (combine_scm parse))
guile> (parse-date "27 September 2003" "gregorian")
(9 27 2003)
guile> (parse-date "27 September 2003" "julian")
(9 14 2003)

The 13 day difference in the calendars is the reason that the Orthodox Christmas is 2 weeks after the Roman Catholic Christmas.

guile> (parse-date "27 September 2003" "hebrew")
(7 1 5764)

Note that the Hebrew date is Rosh HaShannah, the first day of the year 5764. The reason that the month is listed as 7 rather than 1 is inherited from the Emacs calendar implementation. Using the month list in calendar-hebrew-month-name-array-common-year or calendar-hebrew-month-name-array-leap-year correctly gives "Tishri", but since the extra month (in years that have it) comes mid-year, the programming choice that I carried forward was to cycle the months around so that the extra month would come at the end of the list.

guile> (parse-date "27 September 2003" "islamic")
(7 30 1424)
guile> (parse-date "27 September 2003" "iso")
(39 6 2003)

This is the 6th day (Saturday) of week 39 of the year.

guile> (parse-date "27 September 2003" "mayan-long-count")
(12 19 10 11 7)

I won’t get into the detail, but the five numbers reflect the date in the Mayan calendar as currently understood.

Generally, I’d recommend using the more specific functions if you are sure of the date format you expect. For comparing dates, I would further recommend comparing the absolute day count rather than any more formatted format.

This document was generated by Daniel P. Valentine on July 28, 2013 using texi2html 1.82.