[tz] TZ file comments UTF-8? Bastardized HTML?

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Jan 14 16:58:16 UTC 2013


Steffen "Daode" Nurpmeso <sdaoden at gmail.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

>  |If you do decide to use POD, you may want to pick a different letter than
>  |I, since I<> is already a POD formatting code (for italics).  D<> is safe
>  |to use; there's no existing formatting code.

> Well, that was just what came to my mind on saturday.
> Maybe U<> (for URL)?  It seems unused.

Yup, that would work.

> I also can hardly imagine that spreading formatting tags will be
> accepted by the actual tz maintainer(s), since otherwise they
> might have done it 15 years ago.

True.  :)

> I think the script can easily get extended by another mode which simply
> takes an encoding name and reads text from STDIN/file, converting to tz
> database-style comment output along the way; i.e., HTML entities.  It
> would have to decode HTML entities to E<>, which should work, then?
> Shouldn't be that hard either.

Yup, that would also work and wouldn't be too difficult, since E<> takes
the same values as HTML entities.

> ..Well i think for L<> to work the way you show it above the POD parser
> must be adjusted; or we need to use special tags and make POD treat them
> as links.

You mean the L<anchor|http://www.example.com/> form?  No, that's just
standard POD; any POD parser will handle that out of the box.  Or do you
mean not emitting the contents of U<> and D<>?  that would indeed require
some tweaks, but not very difficult ones.

> I haven't yet used POD any more sophisticated than this:

>   use Pod::Text;
>   my $parser = Pod::Text->new(loose => 1, indent => 0, width => 72);
>   $parser->parse_from_file($0, '-');

> and of course normal module documentation, so some hints how to do
> the required task would be appreciated.

Basically, you tell Pod::Simple that you accept some additional formatting
codes with:

    $parser->accept_codes(qw(D U));

and then add new cmd_d and cmd_u subs that do whatever they should do with
the contents.  I can explain more if anyone is interested in going this
direction.

> It of course all stands and falls with wether these adjustments
> will be acceptable for the tz database as such.
> I'm not planning to fork the project.

Indeed.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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