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