Chinese Zodiac - python project

[Denis McMahon]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2013 14:04:08 -0800, edmundicon wrote:

> Greetings everyone! This is my first post on this forum :)
> 
> TL;DR: I want to convert the gregorian years into Chinese years, and
> deal with the fact that the Chinese new years are different each
> gregorian year. If I manage to do that, I'll know which year the user is
> born in Chinese years and can then give him a personal description based
> upon that year!
> 
> I started to learn Python programming language 2 months ago (noob), but
> I like it and I feel like if I keep learning I might become a great
> programmer one day!
> 
> I recently started a small Python project in which my mission is to give
> a personal description to a user based upon the year he / she is born in
> the Chinese Zodiac and I have run into some trouble. For instance, if
> someone is born on the 15'th January 1990, he is actually born 1989
> because the Chinese new year occurred on the 27:th January that year.
> 
> I have a text file which shows when the Chinese new years in gregorian
> years (normal years), starting from 1900-01-31 to 2007-02-18. It goes
> like this:
> 1900-1-31 1901-2-19 1902-2-08 1903-1-29 1904-2-16 1905-2-04 1906-1-25
> ...(and so on)
> 2007-02-18 ( I can't see the logic behind this really)
> 
> The Chinese calendar is divided into cycles of 60 years each, and each
> year has a combination of an animal and an element. There are 12 animals
> and 5 elements, the animals changes each year, and the elements every
> other year. The current cycle was initiated in the year of 1984 which
> was the year of the Wood Rat. The personal descriptions for each
> combination has conveniently also been provided in text files.
> 
> The animals are in this order:
> 
> Rat Ox Tiger Rabbit Dragon Snake Horse Sheep Monkey Rooster Dog Boar
> 
> And the elements are:
> 
> Wood Fire Earth Metal Water
> 
> I have already created a modulus method which takes the input year (the
> gregorian year you were born) and gives you an element and an animal,
> for example if you type "1990" you are given Metal Horse. The problem I
> now have is to convert the gregorian years into Chinese years, and deal
> with the fact that the Chinese new years are different each gregorian
> year. If I manage to do that, I'll know which year the user is born in
> Chinese years and can then give him a personal description based upon
> that year!
> 
> Any advice will be greatly appreciated! Have a nice day :)

Here is one suggestion

Write a function to convert a gregorian date into the number of days 
since 1st January 1900 (we'll call 1st january 1900 your epoch). You will 
need to take leap years into account.

Convert the users date of birth using this function.

Convert your chinese new year dates using this function.

You now have the simple task of comparing the users date of birth as 
daynumber_since_epoch with the start date of each chinese year as 
daynumber_since_epoch.

You may wish to create a list of tuples where each tuple has start_day, 
end_day, year_name:

years = [(0,30,"stone pig"),(31,414,"stone weasel") ....... ]

You should be able to automate creating this list.

You could then search through the list of tuples with a function such as:

yearname( birthdate ):
    foreach thing in years
        if birthdate is in the range specified by the thing
            return the yearname from the thing
    return "constipated program"

(this is obviously not written as python code, you have to do that bit 
yourself)

-- 
Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon at gmail.com