The zic manual page notes that Input lines are made up of fields. Fields are separated from one another by any number of white space characters. so there's nothing "wild" about the format of the files. --ado -----Original Message----- From: Tony Blackmon [mailto:tblackmon@wilbursmith.com] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 2:54 PM To: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: still more problems with the formatting in the tz datafiles i am finding more and more of these. each header comment is clearly marked with tabs delimiting the file, but when you get into the guts of the data some of these tabs are spaces. how do you parse the tzdata text files if the formatting is not correct? as i stated before, i am working under a windows environment, but still want to handle timezone conversion and client timezone selection using the tzcode data. it perplexes me as to how this all works with the data files formatted so wildly. is it meant to be this way or is all of this accidental or unnoticed? --fluid