Sources for Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data

@(#)WWW.htm 7.18

Paul Eggert writes:

The public-domain tz database contains code and data that represent the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe. It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies to UTC offsets and daylight-saving rules. This database (often called zoneinfo) is used by several implementations, including BSD, DJGPP, GNU/Linux, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, and UnixWare. In the tz database's FTP distribution, the code is in the file tzcodeC.tar.gz, where C is the code's version; similarly, the data are in tzdataD.tar.gz, where D is the data's version.

The GNU C Library has an independent, thread-safe implementation of a time zone file reader that is compatible with zoneinfo. This library is freely available under the GNU Library General Public License, and is widely used in GNU/Linux systems.

The Web has several other sources for time zone and daylight saving time data. Here are some recent links that may be of interest.

-- eggert@twinsun.com (1999-03-22)

Arthur David Olson writes:

A good source of information about ISO 8601 seems to be International Standard Date and Time Notation maintained by Markus Kuhn.

-- arthur_david_olson@nih.gov (1996-01-04)