On May 18, 4:10 pm, Ryan Chouinard <rchouin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Quick searches of the group didn't yield much information for me, so
> forgive me if this has been discussed before.
>
> I'm working on an application that could benefit from knowing the
> user's timezone. While I could use the current UTC offset, knowing the
> fixed zone would be the ideal solution. Currently, "time_zone" returns
> a general string (ie "Eastern Time (US & Canada)"). Is there a
> reason for this return format instead of using, say, the standard
> Olson / Zoneinfo / tzdata name (ie "America/New_York")?
>
> -- Ryan Chouinard
It probably accounts for Daylight Savings Time. It would probably be
helpful just to have a database with time zone information stored in
it - of course, you'd need to correct for DST.
