Time Zone question

Dodhiawala, Rajendra raj.dodhiawala at cacheflow.com
Tue Feb 15 21:41:31 UTC 2000


I have looked at various resources for Time Zone data and found your tzcode, tzdata files to be most
useful. Unfortunately, there is one piece of information I have not be able to locate on any of the
TimeZone-related resources on the Internet:

- What is a good way to display time such that TZ info is absolutely clear.

ISO 8601 falls short of this. For example, 
	YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss-08:00
is insufficient because -08:00 is -07:00 in the summer and thus indistinguishable from Arizona which
also uses -07:00.

Adding the timezone makes sense, as in
	YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss-07:00PST

Is there any standard for this or precedence on how this is handled in current (popular?) operating
systems. Any other pointers?

Finally, is there any program/script (for Linux, for example) that will display all the
abbreviations based on the rules in the zone.tab and continent files? Just the most recent
abbreviation will do. Such a program would eliminate errors when manually extracting zone
abbreviations. 

Appreciate your response,
--Raj



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