[tz] Australian Timezone Abbreviations - Next step

[enh]

at the risk of pouring more gas on a fire i don't even care about...
fwiw, here's what Android has for the Australia/ zones, courtesy of
CLDR via icu4c:

    Australia/ACT: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/Adelaide: ACST/ACDT
    Australia/Brisbane: AEST/AEST
    Australia/Broken_Hill: ACST/ACDT
    Australia/Canberra: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/Currie: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/Darwin: ACST/ACST
    Australia/Eucla: ACWST/ACWST
    Australia/Hobart: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/LHI: LHST/LHDT
    Australia/Lindeman: AEST/AEST
    Australia/Lord_Howe: LHST/LHDT
    Australia/Melbourne: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/NSW: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/North: ACST/ACST
    Australia/Perth: AWST/AWST
    Australia/Queensland: AEST/AEST
    Australia/South: ACST/ACDT
    Australia/Sydney: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/Tasmania: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/Victoria: AEST/AEDT
    Australia/West: AWST/AWST
    Australia/Yancowinna: ACST/ACDT

// as produced by the following code, run by AOSP's host dalvikvm on
Ubunutu, using tzdata2012g and icu4c 4.8.
import java.util.*;
public class Tz {
 public static void main(String[] args) {
  for (String id : TimeZone.getAvailableIDs()) {
   if (!id.startsWith("Australia/")) continue;
   TimeZone tz = TimeZone.getTimeZone(id);
   System.out.println(id + ": " +
                      tz.getDisplayName(false, TimeZone.SHORT,
Locale.US) + "/" +
                      tz.getDisplayName(true, TimeZone.SHORT, Locale.US));
  }
 }
}

on Android, i ignore the abbreviations that come with tzdata and get
them from icu4c, since i (a) need localized variants (Europe/Berlin,
for example, is useful in a variety of European languages, not just
German), and (b) need long display names (such as "Australian Central
Standard Time") which i have to get from icu4c anyway. i think the
only thing tzdata has over CLDR here is that last i looked, CLDR
didn't have the historical names (though it does for currencies).

why am i apparently being a dick and not providing a simple diff of
CLDR versus tzdata so we can all see what other zones (if any) there
are differences in? because icu4c makes it awkward for me to get
abbreviations for "non-local" zones. for example, in en_US, i get:

    Europe/Moscow: GMT+03:00/GMT+03:00

though i do get "Moscow Standard Time" as the long name. i haven't
checked, but it might be that icu4c does offer me an abbreviation
here, but i refuse to use it because it's already been taken. i jump
through some number of hoops to maximize the number of abbreviations i
support -- mainly for those poor souls stuck trying to parse dates
because some incompetent is squirting ambiguous "human readable" dates
between computers -- but i refuse to output an abbreviation that i
couldn't unambiguously parse back. i'm not sure how useful my
round-trip guarantee is in practice, but it seemed like a good way to
limit the insanity. so, yeah, i support far fewer abbreviations [in
en_US] than tzdata does [in en_US], but i make up for it in every
other locale :-)

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 4:25 AM, Edwin Groothuis <edwin at mavetju.org> wrote:
> On 21/10/12 04:30 , Paul Eggert wrote:
>
> I took the liberty of doing these tests too:
>
>>     19,200,000 "EST" site:.au
>>     22,700,000 "AEST" site:.au
>>
> So I checked the pages returned for EST. It wasn't until page 42 that the
> first reference of EST with regarding to the timezone was there. And the
> second one at page 53.
>
> While going through this list, I've learned a lot of different meaning for
> word "EST", in all its possible variations in spell capitalization.
> And the last page, 71 in my case, has 5 of the 10 links related to
> non-timezone related usage of the string EST.
>
>
> On the other hand, because of the uniqueness of the string "AEST" (i.e. the
> four letters aren't used anywhere except where to indicate the timezone),
> you have 22,700,00 real hits, while you have 19,200,000 hits on a word which
> usage highly varies.
>
>
> Edwin



-- 
Elliott Hughes - http://who/enh - http://jessies.org/~enh/
NIO, JNI, or bionic questions? Mail me/drop by/add me as a reviewer.