XML Data Format

The XML (Extensible Markup Language) format is very common. See http://www.w3.org/XML for a complete description.

• Empty fields are represented by empty tags.
• All data is provided in UTF-8.

Example

  <?xml version="1.0" ?>
  <holidays>
    <holiday>
      <locale>en-US</locale>
      <region></region>
      <date>2012-01-01</date>
      <description>New Year's Day</description>
      <type>NF</type>
      <notes></notes>
    </holiday>
  </holidays>

Fields

• locale is a combination of an ISO 639-1 language code, such as en (English), and an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, such as US (United States), separated by a hyphen: e.g. en-US.

• region is a subdivision of locale, for those locales that have regional holidays. Regions are represented by their respective ISO 3166-2 Country subdivision code. For example, Patriot’s Day is only observed in the en-US locale in Massachusetts (MA) and Maine (ME), so there are entries for each of those states.

• date is provided in YYYY-MM-DD format.

• description is text that simply describes the holiday.

• type is a collection of single-character indicators, that describe the holiday:

  • N means national holiday, which means locale-wide.
  • R means it is a religious holiday.
  • F means the holiday date is fixed, i.e. on the same day each year.
  • V means the holiday date is variable, e.g. tied to a Monday, or the third Thursday of a month.

• notes are provided in some cases for clarification, but are not to be used as part of the holiday description.