Got some weird subtitle problem the other day

[jdarias]

So I got this movie, and somebody uploaded a set of subtitles in *.srt, since there were no english ones in the original release. The problem is, when I played it in vlc, the subs being displayed were chunks of the timestamps, not the actual subtitles!
I checked them out in subtitleeditor, but couldn't open it, neither could subtitle workshop (both said unsupported subtitle fomat). The weird thing is, any normal text editor opened them just normal. I googled for srt subtitles repair, and found a bunch of little proggies that supposedly would fix any syntax error but none woud do. they crashed.
Out of frustration, I tried an online repair tool, and it worked! I could open them in the editors, and vlc showed them just normal.
So what was the problem? I got a diff app to compare both bad and fixed subs, and turns out that the bad ones were using dots in the timestamps instead of colons! so for example, the bad sub looked like this:

4
00:02:24.900 --> 00:02:27.016
I'll open the door.

5
00:02:28.700 --> 00:02:30.418
You can come in.

And the fixed one like this:

4
00:02:24,900 --> 00:02:27,016
I'll open the door.

5
00:02:28,700 --> 00:02:30,418
You can come in.

Notice the difference?
I just couldn't believe why so many programs were unable to fix this annoyance. Weird, isn't it?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Stupid people don't follow the specs...