Question

I’m trying to display the local time on my system with the TimeZone. How can I display time in this format the simplest way possible on any system?:

Time: 8:00:34 AM EST

I’m currently using the following script:

$localtz = [System.TimeZoneInfo]::Local | Select-Object -expandproperty Id
if ($localtz -match "Eastern") {$x = " EST"}
if ($localtz -match "Pacific") {$x = " PST"}
if ($localtz -match "Central") {$x = " CST"}
"Time: " + (Get-Date).Hour + ":" + (Get-Date).Minute + ":" + (Get-Date).Second + $x

I’d like to be able to display the time without relying on simple logic, but be able to give the local timezone on any system.

Answer 1

While this is a bit … naive perhaps, it’s one way to get an abbreviation without a switch statement:

[Regex]::Replace([System.TimeZoneInfo]::Local.StandardName, '([A-Z])\w+\s*', '$1')

My regular expression probably leaves something to be desired.

The output of the above for my time zone is EST. I did some looking as I wanted to see what the value would be for other GMT offset settings, but .NET doesn’t seem to have very good links between DateTime and TimeZoneInfo, so I couldn’t just programmatically run through them all to check. This might not work properly for some of the strings that come back for StandardName.

EDIT: I did some more investigation changing the time zone on my computer manually to check this and a TimeZoneInfo for GMT+12 looks like this:

PS> [TimeZoneInfo]::Local

Id                         : UTC+12
DisplayName                : (GMT+12:00) Coordinated Universal Time+12
StandardName               : UTC+12
DaylightName               : UTC+12
BaseUtcOffset              : 12:00:00
SupportsDaylightSavingTime : False

Which produces this result for my code:

PS> [Regex]::Replace([System.TimeZoneInfo]::Local.StandardName, '([A-Z])\w+\s*', '$1')
U+12

So, I guess you’d have to detect whether the StandardName appears to be a set of words or just offset designation because there’s no standard name for it.

The less problematic ones outside the US appear to follow the three-word format:

PS> [TimeZoneInfo]::Local

Id                         : Tokyo Standard Time
DisplayName                : (GMT+09:00) Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo
StandardName               : Tokyo Standard Time
DaylightName               : Tokyo Daylight Time
BaseUtcOffset              : 09:00:00
SupportsDaylightSavingTime : False

PS> [Regex]::Replace([System.TimeZoneInfo]::Local.StandardName, '([A-Z])\w+\s*', '$1')
TST