Getting from geolocation (lat/long) to Time.zone

rubyonrails-talk
1

Has anyone found a good solution for setting the Rails Time.zone from a lat/long pair? I've been wrestling around with this.

The closest I can come is using the geonames API, but the problem is I haven't found anything that will do a decent job of converting from their time zone namespace over to the Rails time zone namespace.

There are some hacks out there that use the UTC or GMT offset and convert by finding a time zone with the same UTC offset between the Geonames and Rails time zone sets. Unfortunately, it's not a very good hack because it ignores the fact that you might have multiple time zones of different countries within the same UTC offset but with different policies around daylight savings time. No to mention that it's a little wonky when someone enters a location near Capetown, South Africa and the routine assigns them to the time zone for Helsinki, Finland.

Is there anything that will do a better job of mapping, or am I just using the wrong method entirely (i.e. is there a way to do this without using the Geonames service at all?) It seems to me this is probably something that has to be a service type situation, since making a static mapping of all the time zones and then maintaining it is probably impractical for a small site.

Thanks, Tom

2

Has anyone found a good solution for setting the Rails Time.zone from a lat/long pair? I've been wrestling around with this.

You need a lat/long to timezone database- many are available, I've had good luck with ZIP code database with latitude, longitude, area code, county, county FIPS code, time zone, daylight saving time, ZIP code type, city and state for every 5-digit ZIP code

3

You need a lat/long to timezone database- many are available, I've had good luck with ZIP code database with latitude, longitude, area code, county, county FIPS code, time zone, daylight saving time, ZIP code type, city and state for every 5-digit ZIP code

Forgot to mention- combine this database with something like http://zipcodesearch.rubyforge.org/, and you're good to go.

- D

4

I'm already using the geonames API... unless there's a service out there that returns names matching those in Time.zone it seems like this would leave me with exactly the same problem.