Thanks @steven.daprano, yeah, it would be good to have support for other calendars as well.

In my case, I use the Hijri Umm al-Qura, Gregorian and obviously UnixTime calendars.

You're right, maybe it would be wiser to implement it in the PyPi first and then move it to a standard Python library.

@Lemburg, I checked out the PyPi convertdate library, as Gareth mentioned, it doesn't specify which Islamic calendar it is implementing and had a look at the code, it doesn't look like Umm al-Qura. It seems to be a very roughly calculated Tabular Lunar Calendar (with Hijrah as the reference point), no where near accurate to the actual lunar cycles.


@Gareth
To explain Islamic Hijri Calendar in short, it is basically a sighted Lunar calendar, which has to be sighted at the end of every month to determine the beginning of the next month. Therefore, it is not possible to determine the dates in future (beyond 29th of the month). Every month could be 29 or 30 days. There are 12 months and 354 days in a year.
However, to solve this issue, Muslim astronomers and Scholars over the course of History (1400years) have used two different types of Hijri calendars; one sighted and another calculated. The sighted version of the calendar is accurate but cannot go beyond 29th of the current month.
The astronomically calculated version could go up-to a fixed period which the astronomers have calculated. The calculated/civil calendar is used for Visas, deeds, bank statements, appointments and other civil matters in their respective countries.

One of the predominantly used and astronomically calculated Hijri calendars is the Umm al-Qura Hijri calendar. It was calculated by scholars & astronomers at the Umm al-Qura (Makkah) University.

Sorry about the long post, hope this helps.