A friend of mine is doing a large project for university. One aspect of this project is a switch between Gregorian and Chinese New Year Calenders.
The only problem is that there is no definite formula to switch between Chinese and Gregorian dates. We all know that Gregorian calendars have 12 months with the second month having 29 days during so called "leap years". The Chinese calender usually has 12 months each with around 25 days. Some Chinese years have 13 months.
Does anyone know of any program that will do this?
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
Cheat, line them up accordingly in a spreadsheet, this will give you a conversion, even when there is a formula to use, then have a nice little script search it for the proper line.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
That would only work if both years always have the same number of days.
Posted by Saltah'na (Member # 33) on :
The thing is, my friend wants to use it for ALL dates, not just present day. So if a person wants to check what the Chinese Lunar date is for May 21, 146 AD, well, you get the idea.
And no, Chinese years do NOT have the same amount of days than the Gregorian calendar.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
If you line up a few thousand days by what numerical day of the year you're working with, then you might be able to use Excel to find a best-fit line. That'll be your formula to tell you what the result should be for any other day of the year. Just convert the result into whatever calendar system you want to play with.
Mind you, that's vastly oversimplifying, but I think it'll work in principle.
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
How about working this out by first finding patterns? The patterns for leap years is pretty easy: years evenly divisible by 4 are leap years, with the exception of centurial years that are not evenly divisible by 400 (cite). This site gives a bit of information about the Chinese lunar calendar, but there's a lot of astronomy in the determination of it. It might be worth it to just find an almanac or something that gives the length of the years for a couple millennia or so. See if you can find a pattern that way.
After that, I imagine it would be relatively okay to try and work out how the Gregorian and Chinese lunar calenders progress in relation to each other.
Then there's this, but I'm loath to trust a site that uses pink and pastel blue on it.
Posted by Saltah'na (Member # 33) on :
I saw that site. Now if only I could get the code to it.
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
The big problem is that the two systems are innacurate and have a lot of arbitrary human decisions in them. Gonna have to keep a lot of data.