Get the official American time zone in PHP?

Question

I have account stored in my database and I have each account state on file, from there I want to link each account to a timezone based on the account state.

so if th

Answer 1

It's always best to go to the source: http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.america.php

For all timezones: http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

If you read down the page on the first link, someone was nice enough to make an array if you need the abbreviations:

$aTimeZones = array(
  'America/Puerto_Rico'=>'AST',
  'America/New_York'=>'EDT',
  'America/Chicago'=>'CDT',
  'America/Boise'=>'MDT',
  'America/Phoenix'=>'MST',
  'America/Los_Angeles'=>'PDT',
  'America/Juneau'=>'AKDT',
  'Pacific/Honolulu'=>'HST',
  'Pacific/Guam'=>'ChST',
  'Pacific/Samoa'=>'SST',
  'Pacific/Wake'=>'WAKT',
); 

Answer 2

You haven't thought this through.

Many US states have multiple time zones. For example, South Dakota has both Mountain and Central time zones.

If you desire to resolve a location to a time zone, you will need a much more granular location. Ideally, a latitude and longitude. If you don't have one, you can approximate the centroid lat/lon of a zip code, and then use that against any of many various services or databases that will resolve that to a time zone. But be very careful, not all zip codes represent physical locations, and zip codes change frequently.