From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2007-08-16T23:39:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Any Muslims around?

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:07:43 +0900, Ronald Fischer wrote:

>> Some awesome suggestions here, but I think it's a bit more complex
>> considering how times vary from location to location.
> 
> But you have the timezone for each location, right? If you use the
> DateTime class for calculating times, you can convert between time
> zones using the new_offset method, if you know the offset of the
> respective time zone to UTC.
> 
> If you only know the *name* of the time zone, there is a hack on how to
> do it using the Time class, described in the "Ruby Cookbook" (which I
> would recommend buying anyway). This hack works if your operating system
> honours the TZ environment variable. You switch temporarily to this zone
> (by changing TZ), get the local time there, and switch back to your own
> zone. You then have the time diff to your zone, and you can always get
> the time UTC time by calling Time#gmtime.
> 
> Ronald

I prefer the tzfile gem for dealing with timezones.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/