From: "Ara.T.Howard" <ahoward@...>
Date: 2004-08-04T23:11:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Time#zone

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Farrel Lifson wrote:

> I'm running Ruby 1.8  on XP (ruby 1.8.1 (2003-12-25) [i386-mswin32]).
> Currently Time#zone returns a long form of the timezone for me :
> irb(main):001:0> Time.now.zone
> => "South Africa Standard Time"
>
> On Linux (ruby 1.8.1 (2004-05-02) [i686-linux-gnu]) I get the
> shortened time zone code which is what I would like to get on XP:
> irb(main):001:0> Time.now.zone
> => "SAST"
>
> I've looked through Time#methods and I can't see a way to get the
> shortened code on XP without doing some processing on the result
> (probably just get the first letter of every word) which is not
> something I'd like to do as the script will be run on both Linux and
> XP and I'd like to have it as clean as possible with no OS specific
> exceptions.
>
> Thanks,
> Farrel

i don't have a windows box handy, but this should work

   ~ > ruby -e 'print(Time.now.strftime("%z\n"))'
   -0600

eg. use rfc numeric time zone offest codes instead of the abbreviated ones.

you could also try this

   ~ > ruby -e 'print(Time.now.strftime("%Z\n"))'
   MDT

and play with with the env vars TZ and LC_TIME (man strftime).  but i doubt
you'll get a uniform alpha time zone desc as my man page says

        %Z     The time zone or name or abbreviation.

eg. abbreviations may not not seem to be specified by the spec.

using

   ENV['LC_TIME'] = 'C'
   p Time.now.zone

or

   ENV['LC_TIME'] = 'POSIX'
   p Time.now.zone

__may__ affect output.


-a
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