On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 2:24 PM, <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013, at 8:08, Tobias Conradi wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 1:35 PM, <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
Tokens in the timezone files are separated by _any whitespace_. I don't see the word "token" in ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory
It's the plain english meaning of the word. http://www.wordreference.com/definition/token lists seven English meanings.
Theory does not contain a specification for the format of these files. And you knew that, When? And source for that?
so what was the point of making this post? The plain English meaning of the post.
Any whitespace is the separation in the format that zic accepts (as evidenced by the fact that these lines don't, in fact, break anything), I have no idea why people are trying to impose a tab-separated format on it, And because you do not have any idea why, you reject it?
particularly when they don't have a consistent _number_ of tabs regardless (in northamerica alone, there are 455 lines that begin with a tab, 9 that have extra tabs at the end, and 7 that have two tabs between two fields). The variable number - I don't know whether it is not consistent - was a topic on the list before, e.g. for zone.tab:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-March/017507.html I don't know about benefits of having a variable number, but if there is none, it is a benefit to have a constant number, e.g. for opening files in OpenOffice. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com