Question

How do I parse this time zone string into it’s proper format so that I can use Time.zone = <the proper time zone string>". Currently the known format type is: Eastern Time (US & Canada), Not sure why it doesn’t want to accept an even more precise format, like “(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)”.

Are there any built-in tools in Rails to handle the string I have, and munge it into the proper Time.zone format? Note, the solution should map out correctly to ALL of Rail’s Time Zones list…

Answer 1

Not sure where you are getting your zone string, but check this TimeZone.to_s

# Returns a textual representation of this time zone.
def to_s
  "(GMT#{formatted_offset}) #{name}"
end

# Returns the offset of this time zone as a formatted string, of the
# format "+HH:MM".
def formatted_offset(colon=true, alternate_utc_string = nil)
  utc_offset == 0 && alternate_utc_string || self.class.seconds_to_utc_offset(utc_offset, colon)
end

All you need is Time.zone.name # => "Eastern Time (US & Canada)"

If you don’t have that then parse the string with regex

'(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)'.match(/\(.*\) (.*)/)[1]
#=> "Eastern Time (US & Canada)"

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/5fe88b11f11bb3b30bc23c57b36be4f027d915ba/activesupport/lib/active_support/values/time_zone.rb#L337