Re: Letting users select timezone

David Cantrell wrote:
> Tatsuhiko Miyagawa wrote:
> 
>> You can get the user's country ... from Accept-Language HTTP header
> 
> No you can't.  I prefer to use English (specifically en-gb) whether I'm 
> in the UK, Germany or Japan.  Even if I were to move to Japan 
> permanently, I'd still prefer to use English, and so leave that header 
> set to en-gb, but would also like sites to know that I'm in the 
> Asia/Tokyo timezone.

A better method would be to find all the time zones with the same offset 
as the user. You can get this offset from javascript if you're using a 
web interface. What you don't have is a list of current offsets, so 
you'd have to load each and every time zone module to get its offset. 
Not fast and not cheap.

I'd consider
a) Get a list of time zones that are currently in use (ie, they didn't 
stop in 1982 .. this might be all of them, I can't remember)
b) Create a hash of arrays where the key is the offset (all offsets for 
the TZ .. DST and non-DST)
    eg: ( 1100 => [ 'Australia/Melbourne', 'Australia/Sydney' ... ] )
c) Store that somewhere.

Now when you get an offset of 1100, you have a LOT smaller list of 
possible TZs. Present that list to the user. Along with a button to 
'show all time zones'.

Cheers!
Rick Measham



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