Handling %s format strings

[Kevin Kenny]

eggert at cs.ucla.edu said:
> Which implementation is this?  Is this a parser of tz data that is
> written in Tcl, or is written in some other language and is commonly
> available in Tcl?  If so, I'd like to mention it in tz-link.htm

As of Tcl 8.5 (now in alpha release), Tcl includes in its distribution
a set of files that are an ASCII version of tzdata, and Tcl/C code to
parse and format date/time strings using these as the time zone reference.
There is a parser for the tz data written in Tcl supplied as part of
this distribution in the 'tools' directory; the parser is intended primarily
for use by developers of the Tcl system itself but can obviously be used
by system administrators and others who wish to keep their tz data up
to date between installing Tcl releases.  Tcl is also capable of reading
the binary zoneinfo files (and does so if its own tz data is not installed).

The Tcl Improvement Proposal that put this material into the Tcl core
can be found at http://tip.tcl.tk/173.html, and the manual page for
the revised 'clock' command is at 
    http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/clock.htm

The current alpha release of Tcl 8.5 is at 
    http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.html

If you want to review the code of Tcl's 'zic' file parser, the CVS
HEAD of the source file is at

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/tcl/tcl/tools/tclZIC.tcl?content-type=text%2Fplain

8.5a4 should be out Real Soon Now (the release manager keeps bugging
me about bugs, and I'm going to finish this message and go off
to fix some non-clock-related ones).
--
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin KENNY   GE Corporate Research & Development
kennykb at crd.ge.com           P. O. Box 8, Bldg. K-1, Rm. 5B36A
                             Schenectady, New York 12301-0008 USA