Get the Olson TZ name for the local timezone?

Question

How do I get the Olson timezone name (such as Australia/Sydney) corresponding to the value given by C\'s localtime call?

This is the value overridden vi

Answer 1

One problem is that there are multiple "pretty names" , like "Australia/Sydney" , which point to the same time zone (e.g. CST).

So you will need to get all the possible names for the local time zone, and then select the name you like.

e.g.: for Australia, there are 5 time zones, but way more time zone identifiers:

     "Australia/Lord_Howe", "Australia/Hobart", "Australia/Currie", 
     "Australia/Melbourne", "Australia/Sydney", "Australia/Broken_Hill", 
     "Australia/Brisbane", "Australia/Lindeman", "Australia/Adelaide", 
     "Australia/Darwin", "Australia/Perth", "Australia/Eucla"

---

you should check if there is a library which wraps TZinfo , to handle the time zone API.

e.g.: for Python, check the pytz library:

http://pytz.sourceforge.net/

and

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytz/

in Python you can do:

from pytz import timezone
import pytz

In [56]: pytz.country_timezones('AU')
Out[56]: 
[u'Australia/Lord_Howe',
 u'Australia/Hobart',
 u'Australia/Currie',
 u'Australia/Melbourne',
 u'Australia/Sydney',
 u'Australia/Broken_Hill',
 u'Australia/Brisbane',
 u'Australia/Lindeman',
 u'Australia/Adelaide',
 u'Australia/Darwin',
 u'Australia/Perth',
 u'Australia/Eucla']

but the API for Python seems to be pretty limited, e.g. it doesn't seem to have a call like Ruby's all_linked_zone_names -- which can find all the synonym names for a given time zone.