lunar (version 2.2) - a calendar conversion utility

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

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 "Daylight 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 Chinese characters encoded in (highest-bit-set) GB 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 (C) 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 2001 Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

The last version of this program was released on July 23, 1992 as version 2.1a. This program was first released under the terms of GNU GPL on October 28, 2001 as version 2.2. Both versions are identical except for the license text.

Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung

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.

Bug reports and comments should be sent to lee@umunhum.stanford.edu.

This software has no connection with our employers.