Working with Ethiopian Dates.

ethiodate

This package enables you to work with Ethiopian dates in R like you do with base R Date objects. It can seamlessly convert to and from Gregorian dates, regardless of the way you record them. It supports almost all important parsing techniques used for a base R Date object. If you have ever worked with a Date object, you can do the same with Ethiopian dates. It is designed to work smoothly with the {tidyverse}, including {ggplot2}, {dplyr}, {tibble}, and {lubridate}, making it ideal for data manipulation pipelines. This package ensures lightning-fast computations thanks to the {Rcpp} package that enables the integration of high-performance C++ code. It has built-in checks for leap years and the 13th month (Pagume), which makes this package crucial.

Key Features:

• Custom Date Object: You can convert your date recorded in any style to custom ethdate object.
• Seamless Date Conversion: Effortlessly convert Ethiopian dates to and from Gregorian dates with precision.
• High-Speed Computation: Written in C++ for maximum efficiency.
• Date Arithmetic: Perform date arithmetic operations.
• Day-Based Units: Dates are represented as the number of days since 1963-04-23 EC (1970-01-01 GC) to simplify conversion between calendars.
• Integration with {ggplot2}: Designed to smoothly work with {ggplot2}.

Installation

You can install the development version of ethiodate package like so:

# Install the current version on CRAN
install.packages("ethiodate")

# Install a stable development version from GitHub (requires compilation)
devtools::install_github("GutUrago/ethiodate")

Usage

This package is for you if you have ever faced the following conditions, where;

• You recorded Ethiopian year, month and days as a separate variable and not sure if the combination is valid date.
• You recorded Ethiopian date as “dd-mm-yy”, “yy/mm/dd”, … etc, and you can’t perform any operations beyond string operations.
• You have Ethiopian dates in any of above listed format and want to convert it to Gregorian dates.
• You have Gregorian dates object and want to obtain equivalent Ethiopian dates.
• You want to do some arithmetic operations with Ethiopian dates.
• You want to build and present nicely formatted plots for time trends in local context.

Examples:

library(ethiodate)
library(dplyr)

data.frame(
  eth_year = c(2000, 2007, 2015, 2020, 1950, 2030),
  eth_month = c(8, 2, 13, 5, 7, 5),
  eth_day = c(25, 12, 6, 8, 17, 30)
) |> 
  mutate(
    eth_date = eth_make_date(eth_year, eth_month, eth_day),
    gre_date = as.Date(eth_date),
    eth_dayname = eth_weekday(eth_date, lang = "en"), 
    gre_dayname = weekdays(gre_date) 
  )
#>   eth_year eth_month eth_day   eth_date   gre_date eth_dayname gre_dayname
#> 1     2000         8      25 2000-08-25 2008-05-03    Saturday    Saturday
#> 2     2007         2      12 2007-02-12 2014-10-22   Wednesday   Wednesday
#> 3     2015        13       6 2015-13-06 2023-09-11      Monday      Monday
#> 4     2020         5       8 2020-05-08 2028-01-17      Monday      Monday
#> 5     1950         7      17 1950-07-17 1958-03-26   Wednesday   Wednesday
#> 6     2030         5      30 2030-05-30 2038-02-07      Sunday      Sunday