Bad array returned from DateFormatSymbols.getZoneStrings()

Name: diC59631 Date: 11/20/97


There's an inadvertent API change in the most
recent set of changes from Taligent. Most of the
DateFormatZoneData files were recently changed to
contain placeholder data since we don't have
localized time zone names for any countries.
So each non-English DateFormatZoneData object's
zoneStrings array has one entry. Its internal
zone ID is "Africa/Casablanca" and all of its
localized-name fields are "GMT". Its representative-
city field is MISSING!

Therefore, code expecting DateFormatSymbols.getZoneStrings()
to return an array whose entries each have six
elements will blow up with an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
trying to access the representative-city field.

To reproduce:

DateFormatSymbols symbols = DateFormatSymbols.getInstance(Locale.FRANCE);
String[][] zoneData = symbols.getZoneStrings();
System.out.println(zoneData[0][5]); // BOOM!

In practice, getZoneStrings() isn't documented
well enough for much of anyone to figure out what
it's supposed to return, so this may not impact
anyone-- it's probably also a bug that the
documentation for this routine isn't thorough
enough.
(Review ID: 20199)
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