CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubytimeruby-on-rails-5
Antonio
Antonio

Reputation: 751

Rails 5: Convert Time.zone (e.g "Pacific Time (US & Canada)" ) into a numbered offset (e.g -0700)

This is an ongoing issue I'm having and I don't know how to work with it.

A user sets their Time.zone when they create an account. In this case "Pacific Time (US & Canada)".

When they create an object and enter in the date and time it comes in the format of a string with no explicit timezone offset like so "05/31/2017 2:00 PM"

Knowing these two things. I would like to convert the inputted time string into a UTC format and save it.

I've tried the following but it's not taking the pacific time into account:

time = Time.strptime("05/31/2017 2:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)", "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M %p %Z").utc
=> 2017-05-31 14:00:00 UTC

14:00:00 UTC is 7AM pacific. It should be 21:00:00 as it is currently -0800. I would like to find a method to take timezones into account and save them correctly in UTC format.

It however converts correctly if I give it the exact offset like so: 

time = Time.strptime("05/31/2017 2:00 PM -0800", "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M %p %Z").utc
=> 2017-05-31 22:00:00 UTC

This problem is killing me. I would simply like to save all date and times in UTC format so all that a user has to do is set their timezone and view times correctly. Also taking into account DST if applicable.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1811

Answers (1)

idej
idej

Reputation: 5684

In Rails you can use ActiveSupport to change a time zone without changing value and convert to utc

#parse time as usual
time = Time.strptime("05/31/2017 2:00 PM", "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M %p")

#convert to utc using timezone that you need
res = ActiveSupport::TimeZone.new('Pacific Time (US & Canada)').local_to_utc(time)
#> 2017-05-31 21:00:00 UTC

Upvotes: 1

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