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CONVCAL(1)			  User's Manual 		      CONVCAL(1)

NAME
     convcal - convert dates to different formats

SYNOPSIS
     convcal [OPTIONS] [DATE]

DESCRIPTION
     convcal  is  part of the grace software package, an application for two-di-
     mensional data visualization. convcal converts dates from	and  to  various
     formats.  The  following date formats are supported (hour, minutes and sec-
     onds are always optional):

     iso    1999-12-31T23:59:59.999

     european
	    31/12/1999 23:59:59.999 or 31/12/99 23:59:59.999

     us     12/31/1999 23:59:59.999 or 12/31/99 23:59:59.999

     days   123456.789

     seconds
	    123456.789

     The formats are tried in the following order : users's choice,  iso,  euro-
     pean  and	us (there is no ambiguity between calendar formats and numerical
     formats and therefore no order is specified for them).

USAGE
     convcal reads the dates either on the command line or in the standard input
     if the command line contains no date.

     The user's choice for the input format put one format before the other ones
     in the trial list, this is mainly useful for US citizen  which  would  cer-
     tainly prefer to have US format checked before european format. The default
     user's  choice  (nohint)  does nothing so the following formats of the list
     are checked.

     The separators between various fields can be any characters in the  set:  "
     :/.-T".  One  or more spaces act as one separator, other characters can not
     be repeated, the T separator is allowed only between date and time,  mainly
     for  iso8601.  So	the string "1999-12 31:23-59" is allowed (but not recom-
     mended).  The '-' character is used both as a separator (it  is  tradition-
     ally  used  in iso8601 format) and as the unary minus (for dates in the far
     past or for numerical dates). When the year is between  0	and  99  and  is
     written  with two or less digits, it is mapped to the era beginning at wrap
     year and ending at wrap year + 99 as follows :

     [wy ; 99] -> [ wrap_year ; 100*(1 + wrap_year/100) - 1 ]

     [00 ; wy-1] -> [ 100*(1 + wrap_year/100) ; wrap_year + 99]

     so for example if the wrap year is  set  to  1950	(which	is  the  default
     value), then the mapping is :

     range [00 ; 49] is mapped to [2000 ; 2049]

     range [50 ; 99] is mapped to [1950 ; 1999]

     this is reasonably Y2K compliant and is consistent with current use.  Spec-
     ifying  year  1  is  still possible using more than two digits as follows :
     "0001-03-04" is unambiguously March the 4th, year 1,  even  if  the  user's
     choice  is  us format. However using two digits only is not recommended (we
     introduce a 2050 bug here so this feature should be removed at  some  point
     in the future ;-)

     Numerical	dates (days and seconds formats) can be specified using integer,
     real or exponential formats (the 'd' and 'D' exponant markers from  fortran
     are  supported in addition to 'e' and 'E').  They are computed according to
     a customizable reference date.  The default value is given by  the  REFDATE
     constant  in the source file.  You can change this value as you want before
     compiling, and you can change it at will using the -r command line  option.
     The  default value in the distributed file is "-4713-01-01T12:00:00", it is
     a classical reference for astronomical events (note that the  '-'	is  used
     here both as a unary minus and as a separator).

     The program can be used either for Denys's and gregorian calendars. It does
     not  take into account leap seconds : you can think it works only in Inter-
     national Atomic Time (TAI) and not in Coordinated Unified	Time  (UTC)  ...
     Inexistant   dates  are  detected,  they  include	year  0,  dates  between
     1582-10-05 and 1582-10-14, February 29th of non leap years, months below  1
     or above 12, ...

OPTIONS
     A summary of the options supported by convcal is included below.

     -h     prints the help message on stderr and exits successfully

     -i format
	    set user's choice for input format, supported formats are iso, euro-
	    pean, us, days, seconds and nohint.  At the beginning the input for-
	    mat  is  nohint,  which means the program try to guess the format by
	    itself, if the user's choice does not allow to parse the date, other
	    formats are tried

     -o format
	    force output format, supported formats are iso, european, us,  days,
	    seconds  and nohint.  At the beginning, the output format is nohint,
	    which means the program uses days format for dates read in any  cal-
	    endar format and uses iso8601 for dates read in numerical format

     -r date
	    set reference date (the date is read using the current input format)
	    at	the beginning the reference is set according to the REFDATE con-
	    stant in the code, which is -4713-01-01T12:00:00 in the  distributed
	    file.

     -w year
	    set the wrap year to year

SEE ALSO
     grace(1)

     http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/

AUTHOR
     Luc Maisonobe

     This  man-page  was  written  by Jan Schaumann <jschauma@netmeister.org> as
     part of "The Missing Man Pages Project".	Please	see  http://www.netmeis-
     ter.org/misc/m2p2/index.html for details.

grace				 August 11, 2001		      CONVCAL(1)

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