Timezone Data

[Ryan Chouinard]

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

[Abraham Williams]

Just take the timezone list from: https://twitter.com/account/settings and convert it on your end.

--
Abraham Williams | http://the.hackerconundrum.com
Hacker | http://abrah.am | http://twitter.com/abraham
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Sent from Mountain View, California, United States

[Abraham Williams]

Just take the timezone list from: https://twitter.com/account/settings and convert it on your end.

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 14:10, Ryan Chouinard <rchou...@gmail.com> wrote:

[rchouinard]

Which still doesn't give me a standard list. I can spend an hour and
map the Twitter names to standard timezone names, but my thought was
that it would serve the development community better if the standard
zone names were returned from the start. Just my $.02 cents, though.
You can keep the change. :-)

On May 18, 8:37 pm, Abraham Williams <4bra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just take the timezone list from:https://twitter.com/account/settingsand
> convert it on your end.
>

[rchouinard]

I can get a list of Twitter's zones easily enough, and I understand
that. While I could spend time going through Twitter's timezone select
box and manually map the values to Olson zone names (which is what I'm
sure I'll end up doing), this could be made easier if Twitter simply
returned the standardized names.

I'm not familiar with Ruby, so this may very well be how Ruby lists
and names the zones. My experience with other languages, however, is
that the Olson / tzdata / "Unix" names are fairly standard and plug
right in. I'm not asking where I can find Twitter's zone names, I'm
asking why Twitter returns what it does, and if looking into returning
something else is warranted.

-- Ryan Chouinard

On May 18, 8:37 pm, Abraham Williams <4bra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Just take the timezone list from:https://twitter.com/account/settingsand
> convert it on your end.
>

[Abraham Williams]

I would say the API will try to be consistent with the web interface and those are the strings the web interface currently uses. You can try to convince http://help.twitter.com to change the strings used.

Sent from San Francisco, California, United States

[Nial]

It would be helpful if you could post the results of your conversion
here for other users!

[Moonman239]

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.