Markus: Thank you for your generous feedback on my Historical Date datatype.
If you know what sort of site I administer, then you know that my estimate for the beginning of the universe is a time that is a little over 500 years more recent than the theoretical start of the Julian Period. (Specifically, I maintain that time -4159-10-27T15:28:00 (ISO8601) is the moment of creation.) In fact, I invite you to visit our German site, <http://creationwiki.org/de/> Remember, however, that I base my new date type on the Julian Day, as a 64-bit float. The upper limit of absolute value for such a variable is about 10^308. That many days represents about 3 * 10^305 years. I think the Julian Day ought to be suitable for any set of assumptions. The key to user-value parsing (and also XSD value parsing beyond the typical XSD value range) is the use of regular expressions (regex), and in particular the strategic placement of parentheses in the regex pattern. The function preg_match in PHP will capture expressions that are in parentheses for whatever reason. Once I realized that, and also realized that captured expressions were assigned to a match array with consistent keys, I could easily define parsing patterns that reliably capture day and year figures and month names. Lately I added support for what our research indicates was the likely pre-exilic Hebrew calendar. In the process I discovered that your Date type does not implement tooltip displays. I have implemented tooltip displays in my current version of the type. To do that, I adapted the getShortWikiText function from your Geographic coordinates datatype. I also refined the printvalue function so that it will return only a /preferred/ calendar string--with the preference derived from the user value. The latest version of the file is attached. With it you can see all the things I've done so far. Again, most of the conversion algorithms I used come from: <http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar> John Walker, the author and master of that site, has released all his algorithms (in Javascript form) to the public domain. All I have done, in the case of the Gregorian and Julian calendars, is translate his Javascript to PHP, while substituting class methods and properties for global functions and local or global function variables. His site even has a link for downloading all of the files that drive his calendar converter, as a .ZIP archive. Walker's support for the French Republican calendar will amaze you: he uses astronomical algorithms to predict the equinox at the Paris meridian to determine when a French Republican leap year would actually be observed. He does not have an algorithm for my ancient Hebrew calendar (labeled "AM" for "Anno Mundi"), so I wrote that on my own--and I release that, too. I plan to implement the modern Hebrew calendar next, and will support other calendars as the needs of our site require them. Thank you also, in closing, for the links to the Simile project. I will see whether I can gain any insight there on how to use the new datatype to create historical timelines. Best regards, Terry A. Hurlbut (User:Temlakos) Sysop <http://creationwiki.org/> <http://creationwiki.org/de/>
SMW_DV_HxDate.php
Description: application/php
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