Chris Chandler » timezones http://chrischandler.name Squandering time as a raving egomaniac Thu, 03 Jun 2010 23:16:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Converting latitude and longitude to timezones http://chrischandler.name/ruby/converting-latitude-and-longitude-to-timezones/ http://chrischandler.name/ruby/converting-latitude-and-longitude-to-timezones/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:16:04 +0000 Chris Chandler http://chrischandler.name/?p=39 If you’ve fought it out with localization(l10n) of timezones then you know it can be a pain in the ass.  Further, suppose your localizing arbitrary information where all you’ve really been given is an address.  The relevant information isn’t necessarily in your system and the user might be in the wrong timezone anyway, so no sense in using that.

Here’s a quick Ruby means to convert latitude and longitude into a timezone ActiveSupport recognizes.  This snippet only relies on Hpricot and the freely available Geonames API:

GMT offsets are a convenient way for moving time data in and out of UTC as well as for not having to deal with arbitrary string names.

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