Re: Simplified TimeZone
Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
I'd rather refrain from meddling with these internationally
recognized abbreviations.
Lew wrote:
Are these abbreviations really "internationally recognized"? What is
the standard? Can you point us to any references for more information
on that?
Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
I didn't make a scientific study on it, but if it weren't,
then a time-stamp like: Thu Sep 25 10:33:55 CEST 2008
(from "date") wouldn't be all that useful.
In other words, no.
But then again, who knows, perhaps it indeed isn't...
Not as any sort of international standard.
John B. Matthews wrote:
Dec 25, 2008 07:00:00 EST; UTC-0500; Sydney, Ohio
Dec 25, 2008 23:00:00 EST; UTC+1100; Sydney, Australia
Given the plethora of mappings between local abbreviations and time zones, it
is clear that while the abbrevations may be "internationlly recognized", what
they are actually "recognized" to mean depends on the locale. Even the
Javadocs refer to these abbreviations as "deprecated" for this reason. For
the OP, it means that there's no way that Java will do what they wanted, even
more so because "ET" doesn't even seem to be on the list of locally
"recognized" abbreviations.
When you think about it, that makes sense. "ET" is imprecisely defined, in
that it doesn't reveal the offset from UTC, whereas "EST" and "EDT" do, once
you know to which locale they refer. That renders "ET" even more generally
useless for identifying a timestamp than "EST".
--
Lew