From phil.ross at gmail.com  Mon Sep 24 16:03:05 2007
From: phil.ross at gmail.com (Philip Ross)
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:03:05 +0100
Subject: [TZInfo-users] TimeZone offset reported after utc_to_local
	conversion
Message-ID: <4ac540410709241303o9f957c6v53a7674f51c1efbb@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Danila,

Your message didn't make it to the list because you are not
subscribed. Please see below for my reply.

> I was wondering if it was possible to somehow change the offset of a
> converted date using utc_to_local.
>
>
> Example:
>
> ENV['TZ'] = 'UTC'
>
> t = DateTime.now
> tz1 = TZInfo::Timezone.get('America/New_York')
> tz2 = TZInfo::Timezone.get('Europe/Moscow')
>
> tz1.utc_to_local(t).to_s
> "2007-09-24T12:33:40+00:00"
>
> tz2.utc_to_local(t).to_s
> "2007-09-24T20:33:40+00:00"
>
> Even though the time is right, both offsets show +00:00. Is it possible
> to somehow reset offset to the proper value, i.e. -05:00 and +03:00?

TZInfo always returns times in UTC because it is not possible to have
a Ruby Time object that represents a timezone other than UTC or the
current local timezone. DateTime does support arbitrary offsets, but
since Time doesn't I decided to go for consistency.

TZInfo also always returns the type of argument you pass in. If you
pass in a Time, you get a Time back. If you pass in a DateTime, you
get a DateTime back. Since you are using DateTime in your example, you
could manually adjust the result using the new_offset method.
new_offset also adjusts the time, so this needs to be compensated for:

p = tz1.period_for_utc(t)
d = tz1.utc_to_local(t).new_offset(p.utc_total_offset_rational) -
p.utc_total_offset_rational
d.to_s
=> "2007-09-24T12:33:40-04:00"

Note the -04:00 offset rather than -05:00, since New York is currently
observing daylight savings time.

Regards,

Phil

-- 
Phil Ross
http://tzinfo.rubyforge.org/ -- DST-aware timezone library for Ruby