There is also the original issue of %s being null in 1943. This seems to be a bug. But maybe not. I'm unable from the documents I've seen to determine the intended behavior. None the less, it seems obvious to me that either both the time resulting from the transition and the letter carry forward or neither one does. Have one but not the other carry forward seems nonsensical. ++PLS ________________________________ From: tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov [mailto:tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov] On Behalf Of Mark Davis Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 4:14 PM To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Cc: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: Re: Question on abbreviations My reading of the specification (zic.8.txt) was that the first rule mentioned was operative during the interval from 1942 to "only", that is, during 1942 alone. This was by my reading of: TO Gives the final year in which the rule applies. In addition to minimum and maximum (as above), the word only (or an abbreviation) may be used to repeat the value of the FROM field. While it was explained to me what the actual code does, I don't think this is reflected in the above text -- or at least, not at all clearly. According to this text, if I saw the following: Rule US 1942 1944 - Feb 9 2:00 1:00 W # War The rule should not apply in 1945. So I request that the text be fixed, because the rule clearly, according to the explanations given on this thread, applies *afterwards* (and the circumstances in which it applies need to be clearly specified. Is it until the next Rule that has an SAVE value with the same SAVE value as this Rule? Until the next Rule that has a SAVE value?... mark On 9/27/06, Paul Schauble <Paul.Schauble@ticketmaster.com> wrote: So in this case: Rule US 1942 only - Feb 9 2:00 1:00 W # War Rule US 1945 only - Aug 14 23:00u 1:00 P # Peace Why is %s undefined in 1943? This was the question that started the thread. If the time setting carries forward, surely the letter should also. ++PLS -----Original Message----- From: tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov [mailto:tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov] On Behalf Of Ken Pizzini Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 3:14 PM To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: Re: Question on abbreviations On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 02:37:58PM -0700, Mark Davis wrote:

I share your confusion. If Paul (Eggert's) description is right, then I have to ignore the TO field in some circumstances which are entirely unclear to me. I would much rather see the TO field corrected. That is, if TO=1942 is ignored, and 1945 is the real date, then the line should be corrected to TO=1945.

The key to understanding is that the rules describe a list of *transitions*. After a transition, the described effect on zone offset and abbreviation *remain* in effect until the next transition. The "TO" part of a rule is used to enable a shorthand for a _recurring_ transition, such as "first Tuesday of February", for all years within the range. If "to" is "only", then the *transition* being documented is a singleton, but the transitioned-into offset/abbreviation remains in effect until the _next_ transition, no matter how far in the future.

There are other failures in the parsing. My error messages are: ... I looked into why this is happening, and found:

Zone Europe/Amsterdam 0:19:32 - LMT 1835 0:19:32 Neth %s 1937 Jul 1

But the first LETTER/S defined by Neth is in 1916, so during the range from 1835 to 1916 this is undefined. If the LETTER/S are magically also defined *before* the first FROM, that should be described in the specification.

Yes, this is a failure of the documentation. If a Zone refers to a time within a Rule that is before the first transition mentioned for that rule, then the _oldest_standard_time_ "Letter/s" is used. In this case, AMT.

BTW, the documentation was a first a bit confusing to me, since it says that fields are delimited by spaces, and lists a single Zone UNTIL field. However, if you look carefully at the documentation, there are really 4 fields:

UNTIL_YEAR UNTIL_IN UNTIL_ON UNTIL_AT

which are optional [but only in "truncation" from the end: that is, it

corresponds to the (Perl) regex (UNTIL_YEAR (UNTIL_IN (UNTIL_ON (UNTIL_AT)?)?)?)?].

I'm not the only one to have initially made this mistake: the proposed XML format for the TZ database makes the same mistake.

Confusing: granted. Whether "Until" is one or multiple fields is a matter of interpretation. The _traditional_ understanding is that it is a *single* "timestamp field" which may happen to have spaces within it. BTW the subfields aren't "YEAR IN ON AT", but "YEAR MONTH DAY TIME". In this regard, a recent addition to the tzcode tarball is zoneinfo2tdf.pl, which translates the more free-with-spaces zone tzdata into a form which strictly uses a single tab between fields. This may make life easier for some by simplifying their parser's requirements. (Or not.) --Ken Pizzini