How to parse timezone data?

Question

There has been a recent issue with the timezone data with a claim from some company that claim to has been violated, so IANA has taken it upon themselves to provide the timezone data.

Now the problem is that data hosted here, isn't in a format I can parse easily is there something missing here or do I need to formulate the data to be usable myself, or is there some format that are providing that I am clearly not seeing.

I am used to seeing .csv or .tvs or .xls

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to properly store this data so it can be used to build libraries.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The fields are tab separated. There are Zone and Rule fields. Lines beginning with a # being comments.

Zone field format

# Zone  NAME        GMTOFF  RULES   FORMAT  [UNTIL]

Rule field format

# Rule  NAME    FROM    TO  TYPE    IN  ON  AT  SAVE    LETTER/S

TSV (or CSV) parsers in Python will be able to parse it.