On 7 June 2016 at 04:44, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
Alternatively, zdump could not bother to align outlandish years outside the range -999,9999 or outlandish UT offsets that are more than 100 hours away from UT.
Though all of the space-padding alternatives you propose do have their limitations, as you mention, I think this is the one that remains most workable and portable. In fact, if you include colons in the UT offsets, you need only state that the datetime and offset fields are given with second-level precision, and that all terminal sequences of the substring ":00" within those fields are replaced with three spaces to aid readability.
Something like that might work, I suppose, though we'd probably still get bug reports from compulsive aligners wondering why the outlandish cases aren't aligned properly, or why there's all that white space in the columns.
"Compulsive aligners" will always find something to complain about, surely… but maybe if the stated goal isn't so much absolute "alignment" as general "readability", they might pick on something else instead. -- Tim Parenti