From: Spencer, Denis [OCDFR] [SMTP:dspencer@ocdfr.jnj.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 5:07 AM Are there any standards (like ISAO country codes) for time zones? There is a standard for numeric codes: ISO 8601. It allows several representations, e.g. "+0100" or "+01" or "+01:00" for Central European Time. "+0100" seems the most popular, as it also conforms to Internet RFC 822. It also allows "Z" for UTC. There is no standard for traditional alphabetic codes. They are ambiguous in practice, and fixing this would be more of a political mess than it's worth. Just try telling the Australians that "EST" is taken by the US, or telling the Israelis that India owns "IST"! eg we use GMT = Greenwich Mean Time CTE = Central European Time Surely you meant "CET"? But we need others. You can look in the tz database for the abbreviations that it uses, but they are not official (and in many cases are my own invention). At one point Vic Abell <abe@purdue.edu> was maintaining a more extensive list that he gleaned partly from email headers, but I don't know what its current status is. GNU getdate (available as part of the GNU C library) also has a list. For more about ISO 8601 and the tz database, please see: http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm