Question

In receiving iCal events from Outlook, it is specifying the timezone in the long format:

DTSTART;TZID=Eastern Standard Time:20120521T180000

That is, what you’d get from TimeZone.getDisplayName().

How can I go from that (Eastern Standard Time) to a TimeZone object?

Answer 1

Well, it ain’t pretty, but here’s what I ended up with (basically, iterate over available TZ’s, searching for a getDisplayName() match):

// NOTE: vTZID is the timezone ID as presented by the iCalendar format
// For example ‘Eastern Standard Time’. I only do this if the TZ cannot be found by the normal method
// (that is, TimeZone.getTimeZone())

boolean foundTZ=false;
for (String availId : TimeZone.getAvailableIDs()){
  if (vTZID.trim().equalsIgnoreCase(TimeZone.getTimeZone(availId).getDisplayName())){
    vTimezone = TimeZone.getTimeZone(availId);
    foundTZ = true;
    break;
  }
}