Web service – current time zone for a city

timezoneweb services

Is there a web service of some sort (or any other way) to pull a current time zone settings for a (US) city. For the parts of the country that don't follow the Daylight Saving Time and basically jump timezones when everyone else is switching summer/winter time… I don't fancy creating own database of the places that don't follow DST. Is there a way to pull this data on demand?

I need this for the database server (not for client workstations) – there entities stored in the database that have City, State as properties. I need know current timezone for these entities at any moment of time.

Best Answer

We encountered same issue and, alongside the great suggestions above, Google appears to have two complementary APIs, one for Time Zone from geocode (latitude/longitude) data and the geocode API.

For example, to get the time zone and offset for San Francisco:

1) Convert the city to a geocoded location:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=San%20Francisco,+CA&sensor=false

The geocoded location is in the JSON return data:

"location": {
    "lat":  37.77492950,
    "lng": -122.41941550
}

2) Convert the geocoded location to a local timezone and offset, if any:

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/timezone/json?location=37.77492950,-122.41941550&timestamp=1331161200&sensor=false

Which returns the current time zone information:

{
          "status": "OK",
       "dstOffset":  0.0,
       "rawOffset": -28800.0,              
      "timeZoneId": "America/Los_Angeles",
    "timeZoneName": "Pacific Standard Time"
}

Time zones for a region can change for a variety of reasons. So it is a good idea to find an authoritative server-based solution and not cache. For more information see Wikipedia's Time Zone article.

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