On Sep 20, 9:58am, lupe christoph wrote: } Subject: Re: Dates in Mush } } "MET DST" comes from zoneinfo: } } # @(#)europe 1.3 89/02/13 SMI; from Arthur Olson's 3.1 } } ... } Rule M-Eur 1986 max - Mar lastSun 2:00s 1:00 " DST" } Rule M-Eur 1986 max - Sep lastSun 2:00s 0 - } ... } Zone MET 1:00 M-Eur MET%s } ... } } This means that "MET" is suffixed by " DST" in the period "Mar lastSun 2:00s" } till "Sep lastSun 2:00s". Hm. Looks as though something like Rule M-Eur 1986 max - Mar lastSun 2:00s 1:00 S Rule M-Eur 1986 max - Sep lastSun 2:00s 0 - ... Zone MET 1:00 M-Eur ME%sT would produce what B-news (and mush) are expecting for zones. } You might want to ask seismo!elsie!tz about the names. OK, tz is on the To: line. Maybe he (Arthur? Is that you?) could shed some light on the subject. As nearly as I can tell, the B-news parser is prepared to handle arbitrarily mixed cases, periods between the letters, and practically every other combination *except* two words separated by a space. Mush is a less robust about mixed cases and so on because it doesn't expect to be parsing anything but machine-generated date strings. } > Thanks for the info. I think I'm going to try to find a } > better way to parse for it, though. It should be possible } > to recognize it without explicitly reading it into a string, } > e.g. match it literally in the sscanf format or something. } Regular expressions ? Well, actually, what you did isn't too bad in theory but is overkill in all but one of the cases. Even if we do read it into a string, it's not necessary to add a new sscanf call every time; just add the %3s (you used %4s, but you should have allocated a 5-char buffer for that) after the %7s that is already there. Note that the comparisons are for things like (sscanf() >= 5) in nearly all cases; the zone is already expected to be missing, so it won't hurt to also ignore a missing DST (not) tacked on after the zone. The only one where you need the explicit match is one where the zone name appears in the middle of the string. -- Bart Schaefer schaefer@cse.ogi.edu