On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:15 PM, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes<sthoe...@efn.org> wrote: > On Wed, August 5, 2009 12:52 pm, Ted Byers wrote: >> Is there, in the various timezone packages, support somewhere for >> finding out what the timezone is for a given city/state? I have, in my >> database, extensive data with the usual contact information from users >> from around the world. If at all possible, I would like to query the data >> managed by one of the timezone packages to determine the local users' >> timezones from their mailing address. Is this possible? Using what? > > For countries with a single timezone, you can look it up by iso3166 two > character code in %DateTime::TimeZone::Catalog::ZONES_BY_COUNTRY. > > For other countries, I don't know of such support. You can read the > comments in zone.tab or the longer comments in the region files in > the tzdata package at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/. > Thanks Yitzchak
So the short answer is that there is no solution at present. Although we get traffic from all over the world, the bulk of it is from the US and Canada, each of which has several time zones. When I look at the documentation for the timezone catalog, I see for north american data for a small number of cities. Unfortunately that doesn't help for the vast majority of mailing addresses in north america. I naively hoped that someone would have assembled a database mapping state/province codes within countries to their timezones. Isn't it odd that, in the Asia data, there are values for Gaza and Jerusalem, which are only a short distance apart (in terms of how far a crow would have to fly to travel between them, not politically), or more odd, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore (which are separated only by a narrow channel), and yet I don't see any data for the major Indian cities like Mumbai, Calcutta or Delhi. If there are Indian cities represented there, I don't know their names. And THAT strikes me as odd, given that India, by itself, has about a quarter of the world's population and it has some of the world's largest cities. And yet, in the american data, there are values for Glace Bay, Goose Bay, Thunder Bay, Whitehorse. It seems strange that what are tiny little villages are represented while such huge cities are not. Oh well, that's just another thing in this world that doesn't make sense. Thanks anyway, Ted
