uposatha 0.1.0

An API for the Thai (Mahanikaya) Calendar

API for the Thai Lunar Calendar

This package provides a simple API for working with the seasons, moon days and holidays of the Thai calendar. Some use cases might include creating a printable calendar or sending a notification when there is an upcoming holiday.

Example: Rains Retreat 2017

from uposatha.calendar import Calendar
from uposatha.elements import HolidayName, SeasonName

cal = Calendar()

rainy_season = [season for season in cal.seasons
                if season.name == SeasonName.RAINY and
                season.first_day.year == 2017][0]


pavarana = [holiday for holiday in rainy_season.holidays
            if holiday.name == HolidayName.PAVARANA][0]

start = rainy_season.first_day.strftime("%d/%m/%y")
end = pavarana.uposatha.falls_on.strftime("%d/%m/%y")

print(f"Rains 2017: {start} to {end}")

Prints: Rains 2017: 09/07/17 to 05/10/17

The Calendar Class

Most users of the package will start like so:

from uposatha.calendar import Calendar
cal = Calendar()

This covers a specific range of dates as we need to know when years have extra months and days provided. You can see the calender range:

>>> cal.start_date
datetime.date(2010, 3, 1)
>>> cal.end_date
datetime.date(2030, 11, 10)

When created, the calendar will generate a tuple of all seasons:

>>> len(cal.seasons)
62

There are two helper functions:

cal.next_uposatha()
cal.current_season()

These return instances of the classes described below.

The Season Class

Season is defined in the uposatha.elements module:

>>> season = cal.seasons[0]
>>> season.first_day
datetime.date(2010, 3, 1)
>>> season.last_day
datetime.date(2010, 7, 26)
>>> season.name
<SeasonName.HOT: 'Hot'>
>>> season.type
<SeasonType.EXTRA_MONTH: 'Extra Month'>

SeasonName and SeasonType are Enum classes defined in uposatha.elements.

The Uposatha Class

Each season has a tuple of Uposathas:

>>> uposatha = season.uposathas[0]
>>> uposatha.falls_on
datetime.date(2010, 3, 15)

You can combine this information with the season:

>>> f"Uposatha {uposatha.number_in_season} of {len(season.uposathas)}"
'Uposatha 1 of 10'

And we have another enum - MoonPhase:

>>> uposatha.moon_phase
<MoonPhase.NEW: 'New'>

The Holiday Class

There are four holidays:

• Vesak Day
• Magha Puja
• Asalha Puja
• Pavarana Day

Holiday instances can be found in two ways:

>>> vesak = season.holidays[0]
>>> no_holiday = uposatha.holiday

Note that when we created uposatha it was not a holiday. no_holiday is None. Holidays also have a reference to their uposatha:

>>> vesak.uposatha.number_in_season
6

The enum HolidayName is in uposatha.elements:

>>> vesak.name
<HolidayName.VESAK: 'Vesak Day'>

The HalfMoon Class

There is a tuple of half moons in each season. Each is just a date and moon phase.

>>> half_moon = season.half_moons[0]
>>> half_moon.moon_phase
<MoonPhase.WANING: 'Waning'>
>>> half_moon.falls_on
datetime.date(2010, 3, 8)

Calendar Configuration

In order to generate the calendar some information is needed. This includes:

• Start date
• Start season
• End Season
• End year
• Years with extra month added.
• Years with extra day added.

This information is specified in the configure module and is available via the calendar object:

>>> cal.config.start_date
datetime.date(2010, 2, 28)
>>> cal.config.extra_day_years
[2016, 2020, 2025, 2030]

NB: If anyone knows this information beyond 2030, let me know!

Acknowledgements

The starting point of this project was the Forest Sangha calendars. They in turn provide a link to an ical file for importing into various calendar applications. The code for generating this file is available at the splendidmoons github page. This is written in Go and does not provide a licence so I began by parsing the file in python. You can see the code at https://github.com/jhanarato/uposatha-ical

Leveraging that, I went back and wrote the uposatha package from scratch, testing with the data from uposatha-ical. Thanks to the Forest Sangha and the Splendid Moons developers!