[tz] Tab/Space Formatting Inconsistency - Asia Ver 2023c

[Alois Treindl]

You might want to read the zic man page, which describes the format of 
the zic input files (file asia is one of them)

>        Input lines are made up of fields.  Fields are separated from one another by  one  or
>        more  white  space characters.  The white space characters are space, form feed, car‐
>        riage return, newline, tab, and vertical tab.  Leading and trailing  white  space  on
>        input  lines  is  ignored.  An unquoted sharp character (#) in the input introduces a
>        comment which extends to the end of the line the sharp character appears  on.   White
>        space characters and sharp characters may be enclosed in double quotes (") if they're
>        to be used as part of a field.  Any line that is blank (after comment  stripping)  is
>        ignored.   Nonblank  lines are expected to be of one of three types: rule lines, zone
>        lines, and link lines.

There is no rule about what kind of white space is to be used between 
fields.

If you write a parser, it has to be able to deal with all kinds of white 
space.

If you want a more machine readable format, try tzdata.zi which is the 
output of zishrink.awk

If you rely on the pre-formatting utilities which are parts of the 
project, your job becomes much easier.


On 07.12.23 15:31, Gary Cho via tz wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> While writing software to parse through the database, I found the 
> following inconsistencies in the "asia" file
> 
> 1) Line 3463 to 3569  -  Rule should be followed by a tab instead of a space
> 2) Line 3587 ,3589,3591,3593  - STDOFF should be followed by a tab 
> instead of space
> 3) Line 3096  - STDOFF should be followed by a tab instead of space
> 
> 
> Gary Cho
> 
>