How to automatically detect user's timezone?

Question

hi i am creating a web application , where if a user register we will show the created date.

For that we are using Current time stamp in my sql table.Which shows ser

Answer 1

You can't get a user's timezone on the server side, and you can only make a guess at it on the client side.

If you rely on getting the user's IP address then you could geolocate that and deduce a time.

The way this is usually done is by asking the user (when they register, for instance) what timezone they are in and then use this in your time calculations.

Answer 2

With a small "cheating" (using client side scripting) and posting the result to your server, you can access your client's timezone.

For example you can use this javascript library:

https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect

var tz = jstz.determine(); // Determines the time zone of the browser client
tz.name(); // Returns the name of the time zone eg "Europe/Berlin"

Demo: http://pellepim.bitbucket.org/jstz/

Answer 3

The most reliable method is to ask the user to set his own timezone. I think it's a good idea to have a timestamp of when the users account was created in your own database for your own use.

These are the steps I would take to have a users timezone:

1- Preserve the timestamp column that you have for your own usage
2- Add a new column for the actual users timezone
3- Use javascript to retrieve the timezone:
new Date().getTimezoneOffset()/60;<br/>
4- Also allow users to set there own timezone as well

You can also take it a step further and use a geo-location service to detect a users timezone.

Answer 4

For geolocation you can use http://ipinfodb.com/, work great with an API!

function GeoLocation($precision='city',$ip,$api) {

    if($precision == "country") {
        $file = "ip_query_country.php";
    }
    else {
        $file = "ip_query.php";
    }

    $params = @file_get_contents("http://api.ipinfodb.com/v2/ip_query.php?key=".$api."&ip=".$ip."&timezone=true");
    $fields = @new SimpleXMLElement($params);
    foreach($fields as $field => $val) {
        $result[(string)$field] = (string)$val;
    }
    return $result;
}

Answer 5

Use javascript solution

http://www.onlineaspect.com/2007/06/08/auto-detect-a-time-zone-with-javascript/

Demo should show your timezone in select box.

http://onlineaspect.com/examples/timezone/index.html (Dead link)