The documentation is in zic.8.txt.<br><br>I share your confusion. If Paul (Eggert's) description is right, then I have to ignore the TO field in some circumstances which are entirely unclear to me. I would much rather see the TO field corrected. That is, if TO=1942 is ignored, and 1945 is the real date, then the line should be corrected to TO=1945.
<br><br>There are other failures in the parsing. My error messages are:<br><br>??? Format too short: '' under Europe/Amsterdam;<br>??? Format too short: 'S' under Europe/Amsterdam;<br>??? Format too short: '' under Europe/Moscow;
<br>??? Format too short: 'S' under Europe/Moscow;<br><br>I looked into why this is happening, and found:<br><br>Zone Europe/Amsterdam 0:19:32 - LMT 1835<br> 0:19:32 Neth %s 1937 Jul 1<br><br>
But the first LETTER/S defined by Neth is in 1916, so during the range from 1835 to 1916 this is undefined. If the LETTER/S are magically also defined *before* the first FROM, that should be described in the specification.
<br><br>Mark<br><br>BTW, the documentation was a first a bit confusing to me, since it says that fields are delimited by spaces, and lists a single Zone UNTIL field. However, if you look carefully at the documentation, there are really 4 fields:
<br><br>UNTIL_YEAR UNTIL_IN UNTIL_ON UNTIL_AT<br><br>which are optional [but only in "truncation" from the end: that is, it corresponds to the (Perl) regex (UNTIL_YEAR (UNTIL_IN (UNTIL_ON (UNTIL_AT)?)?)?)?]. <br>
<br>I'm not the only one to have initially made this mistake: the proposed XML format for the TZ database makes the same mistake.<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/27/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Paul Schauble
</b> <<a href="mailto:Paul.Schauble@ticketmaster.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
Paul.Schauble@ticketmaster.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Then I'm confused. At the end of 1942, that rule should expire, because
<br>of the "only" leaving what rule in effect? Apparently none, leaving the<br>time in 1943 undefined.<br><br>Where can I find a explanation of the tz text database format?<br><br> Thanks,<br> ++PLS<br><br>
-----Original Message-----
<br>From: <a href="mailto:tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov</a>]<br>On Behalf Of Paul Eggert<br>Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 9:29 AM
<br>To: <a href="mailto:tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov</a><br>Subject: Re: Question on abbreviations<br><br>"Mark Davis" <
<a href="mailto:mark.davis@icu-project.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">mark.davis@icu-project.org
</a>> writes:<br><br>> According to the spec, TO = "only" is equivalent to saying that the TO<br>value<br>> equals the FROM value.<br><br>Yes, that's what's happening here. The rule to switch to DST applies
<br>only in 1942. There is no rule to switch _out_ of DST in 1942, so DST<br>continues until 1945, the next rule that applies.<br><br>>> Rule NAME FROM TO TYPE IN ON AT SAVE<br>LETTER/S<br>
>> > ...
<br>>> > Rule US 1942 only - Feb 9 2:00 1:00 W #<br>War<br>>> > Rule US 1945 only - Aug 14 23:00u 1:00 P<br>#<br></blockquote></div><br>