Tobias Conradi wrote:
By using only [A-Za-z0-9] in name components and "/" as component separator, the IANA time zone database would allow easy transformation from IANA time zone names into class names or ids and backward.
Currently having increasing fun with an insane attempt to restrict names to some simple 'English' subset's of characters in a couple of other areas, I think the discussion should be on ALLOWING the full Unicode character set. This is the 21st century and many more users do not even speak English! And I am English and only speak English ... Personally I could make a case for using ISO 3166 country codes and perhaps augmenting that with an area code, so that in addition to English versions of zone names, local translation tables could be introduced in a standard way? But this probably a separate project to the time zone data :(
Some environments don't allow "/". Since "/" is part of the zone name, a replacement may be needed.
The use of "/" makes perfect sense since it groups zones into natural folders and sub-folders. It's up to you code to decide what to do with it. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk// Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php