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Simple Time Zone Format

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)"s standard Time Zone Names uses characters that are NOT compatible with many applications.

We have designed a Simple Time Zone Format to be used to achieve universal compatibility across all computing systems and applications. For example, for use with APIs that have conflicting characters, for use as filenames across different file systems etc.

1. Traditional Time Zones

Traditional Time Zone Names have 2 parts (Area and Location) separated by the first / character in the name:

Area Part / Location Part
e.g.

  1. Australia/Sydney
  2. Asia/Hong_Kong
  3. America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires
  4. Etc/GMT+10

There are currently 11 possible Areas in the Area Part:
Africa, America, Antarctica, Arctic, Asia, Atlantic, Australia, Etc, Europe, Indian, Pacific.

Note the timezone database keeps on updating, as at 2013-02-15, the latest version is 2022g.

2. Simple Time Zones

To get the Simple Time Zone Format, the standard Time Zones Names are transformed in the following way:

  1. make all lowercase
  2. extract first 3 characters from the Area Part (in front of first /)
  3. if there are more / in the Location Part (behind first /) then extract first 3 characters after each /
  4. for the last / in the Location Part keep all characters after the / (no need to extract characters)
  5. remove all NON a-z 0-9 characters from Location Part (behind first /)
  6. concatenate the resulting Area and Location parts

For examples the same 4 time zones above now become:

  1. aussydney
  2. asihongkong
  3. ameargbuenosaires
  4. etcgmt10

Simple Time Zone format does NOT support obscure Non 2-part Time Zones (those without the / character).