Alexandre Petrescu wrote:
But the names of the timezones are a much more difficult matter. The names of cities, countries or regions are so difficult to identify. It comes down to manually grepping 'city' to identify the continent file, and then vi to search for the Zone. The principal difficulty in this is to write down 'city' in the right way; and that way is not necessarily the correct way of writing 'city'. There is an additional difficulty in identifying _which_ city is representative for a particular place whose time and DST I need, but that is a geography problem.
GeoNames (https://www.geonames.org/) is your friend. It lists millions of places, each with an associated tzid, and most with a variety of localized names.
Additionally, one might not have a usable computer to store that data to. So all one could do is to rely on printed tables of most recent timezone data that was available when Internet was last available.
Well, sure, if you can’t even assume the existence of a computer, then school’s pretty much out. -- Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org