Repcal

A small application that converts date and time to the systems used by the French First Republic.

The calendar from 1793 to 1805 and decimal time for about a year between 1794 and 1795. More information can be found on Wikipedia.

It uses the Romme method of calculating leap years, as in keeping the ones used by the French Republic and using the Gregorian rules for the years after the calendar was abolished.

CLI Tool

Installation using pipx:

$ pipx install repcal

When called without any parameters it will print the current local time and date:

$ repcal
7:76:5 - Septidi 7 nivôse an CCXXXII

Conversions

-i DATE, --input DATE

This parameter accepts a specific date and/or time in ISO format and will print it's republican counterpart.

$ repcal -i '1969-07-20 20:17:40'
8:45:60 - Primidi 1 thermidor an CLXXVII

UTC Offset

-u OFFSET, --utc-offset OFFSET

This parameter is used to get the current date and time for a given number of standard minutes from UTC. For example, the current time in New York (EST, UTC-05:00):

$ repcal -u -300

Paris Mean Time

-p, --paris-mean

For the full republican experience, it can also use Paris Mean Time (6.49 decimal minutes ahead of UTC).

Output Formatting

-f [FORMAT], --format [FORMAT]

The default output format can be overridden with a string containing placeholders for specific datetime values.

$ repcal -i '1969-07-20' -f '{%d} {%+B}'
1 Thermidor

Using -f, --format without a provided format string will print a cheat sheet of available placeholders.

The format can also be set using the environment variables REPCAL_DATE_FORMAT and REPCAL_TIME_FORMAT:

$ REPCAL_DATE_FORMAT='{%d} {%+B}' repcal -i '1969-07-20'

Python Package

The script can also installed with pip and used as a package in other Python projects:

from repcal import RepublicanDate, DecimalTime
from datetime import datetime

n = datetime.fromisoformat('1969-07-20 20:17:40')
rd = RepublicanDate.from_gregorian(n.date())
dt = DecimalTime.from_standard_time(n.time())

# The objects have standard string representations,...
print(rd) # Primidi 1 thermidor an CLXXVII
print(dt) # 8:45:60

# ...access to specific properties...
print(rd.get_year_roman()) # CLXXVII
print(dt.decimal) # 0,8456

# ...and formatting.
print(rd.get_formatter().format('{%d} {%+B}')) # 1 Thermidor