eeu.cat — Country/Continent Bounding-Box Table

Status: ✅ Cracked · 759 bytes · NOT_COMPRESSED

A per-country (+ one continent-level "Europe" aggregate) real-world bounding-box table, indexed by the same country numbering eeu.cal uses. Previously entirely unexamined — only a candidate 19-byte record size had been derived from the shared header fields (see Header Trailer Fields).

Record format

94-byte header (record count 35 read straight off its own header field), then exactly 35 fixed 19-byte records:

uint24 LE  country_id   -- same numbering as eeu.cal (0=Europe, 1-34=countries)
int32 LE   lon_min      -- degrees = value / 100000
int32 LE   lat_min
int32 LE   lon_max
int32 LE   lat_max

Same /100000 degree convention used everywhere else on this disc.

Validation — checked directly against real-world geography

Country	id	Bounding box (lon, lat)	Note
Germany	8	(5.87, 47.28) – (15.04, 55.05)	Essentially exact
Austria	2	(9.53, 46.39) – (17.16, 49.02)	Correct down to real borders
Switzerland	6	(5.96, 45.82) – (10.49, 47.80)	Correct
Italy	15	(6.06, 35.49) – (19.30, 47.07)	Correct, incl. Sicily
San Marino	27	(12.40, 43.89) – (12.52, 43.99)	Correctly tiny — real microstate
Liechtenstein	17	(9.48, 47.05) – (9.62, 47.26)	Correctly tiny
Vatican City	34	(12.45, 41.73) – (12.66, 41.91)	The smallest of the three — correct, it's the world's smallest country
Norway	23	(4.51, 57.75) – (31.13, 71.18)	Correctly reaches its real eastern border with Russia via Finnmark
Russia	26	(19.64, 41.28) – (179.38, 73.52)	Reaches 179.38°E — matches this dataset's already-documented far-east Russia coverage
"Europe"	0	(1.69, 34.80) – (179.38, 73.52)	A genuine bounding UNION over every member country's own box, not a separately-surveyed continent shape (shares its own max longitude exactly with Russia's)

One honest anomaly, not resolved this session

Denmark (id 9) shows lon_min = 1.69°E — identical, bit-for-bit, to "Europe"'s own overall lon_min. Real mainland Denmark's westernmost point is much further east (~8°E). Every other country's own values look geographically plausible in isolation, so this is flagged as a real, narrow open question rather than swept into "probably fine."

Practical use

Combine with eeu.cal's country_id → name mapping for a labeled country-bbox table — e.g. a "zoom to country" feature, or a sanity check/complement to eeu.cty's own per-locality bounding boxes.

Reader code

research/cat_reader.py — read_cat().