[tz] Non-ASCII outside comments?

[Guy Harris]

On Jun 25, 2014, at 12:17 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> Arthur David Olson wrote:
>> Should zic permit non-ASCII characters in zone names? In time zone
>> abbreviations?
>> If they are permitted, should zic warn about them?
> 
> Currently zic allows non-ASCII characters in both places, no?  Or more precisely, zic allows any byte except for ", newline, and the null byte.  So the question is whether zic should stop allowing nearly-arbitrary byte strings, even byte strings that are not properly encoded characters.
> 
> The simplest thing to do is to leave zic alone.  I don't see much harm in that, though perhaps I'm missing something.

+1

But perhaps the documentation should indicate that:

	the byte strings for zone names will be used, as is, in OS calls to create files, and we don't guarantee what effect that will have (for example, on at least one UNIX(R), with the default file system - regardless of whether it's running case-sensitive or case-insensitive - some amount of processing is done on file names to convert them to UTF-16 on disk);

	the byte strings for abbreviations will be copied over to the file, without interpretation;

and that you use non-ASCII characters at your own risk.