[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Feb 25 18:43:38 UTC 2019


On 2/25/19 2:32 AM, Martin Burnicki wrote:
> If the current time zone names should indeed just be taken as IDs rather
> than real names then IMO it would be very helpful if there also was a
> list of mappings provided that links readable display names to TZDB ID
> names.

tzdb provides this in its combination of the files zone1970.tab and
iso3166.tab, the latter useful if the former simply lists country codes.
For example, zone1970.tab maps America/Porto_Velho to "Rondônia" (since
the country of Brazil has multiple timezones), and maps Europe/Prague to
CZ,SK which iso3166.tab in turn maps to "Czech Republic" and "Slovakia"
(since this timezone has multiple countries).

The tzdb files support only American English; as Tony mentioned, for
other locales CLDR is the way to go.

> For example, the zone "Europe/Macedonia" is displayed as
> "Europa/Makedonien" on my Linux/KDE system set to German language.
That's odd, as tzdb has no zone named "Europe/Macedonia". North
Macedonia is currently represented by Europe/Belgrade. If tzdb had a
timezone named "Europe/Macedonia", we'd have to worry about renaming it
to "Europe/North_Macedonia" now.

Perhaps the strings "Europe/Macedonia" and "Europa/Makedonien" are part
of the KDE user interface to tzdb; if so, KDE will need to deal with the
country's recent renaming.



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