Parsing a TimeZone name string that includes GMT offset hours

Question

I did find this question but I am still stumbling around looking for a simple solution to the following:

An API call returns the following format which looks like they are using Time.zone.to_s

irb> ShopifyAPI::Shop.current.timezone
=> "(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)"

I would like to parse the "(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)" into a Ruby class and output the TimeZone name "Pacific Time (US & Canada)"

Alternately I could just strip the "(GMT-08:00)" offset and be left with a clean TimeZone name "Pacific Time (US & Canada)" but this seems like a messy string editing solution.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 23 '19 at 20:08

2

ShopifyAPI::Shop.current returns properties documented here. Yes, timezone is one of them, but it is intended to be a display name, not something you should parse.

Instead, use the iana_timezone property, which will give you the IANA time zone identifier, such as America/Los_Angeles. These are compatible with Rails, as well as Ruby's tzinfo gem, and also are used in many other platforms.

irb> ShopifyAPI::Shop.current.timezone
=> "(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)"

irb> ShopifyAPI::Shop.current.iana_timezone
=> "America/Los_Angeles"

If you want to get a Rails time zone from there, you can use the MAPPING constant defined in ActiveSupport::TimeZone. Though I'd avoid it if possible, for the reasons mentioned in the timezone tag wiki in the "Rails Time Zone Identifiers" section at the bottom.

answered Apr 23 '19 at 20:08

Matt Johnson-Pint

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Thank you, I missed the iana_timezone property in the API reference – kg. Apr 23 '19 at 20:20
@kg. your question is about _parsing_ a given timezone string from an (external) API whereas this answer is about _formatting_ a timezone. How did it solve your parsing problem? – Stefan Apr 24 '19 at 10:13
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It was an [XY Problem](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378/201534). How to get a useable time one identifier from the Shopify API was the X. Parsing strings was the Y. – Matt Johnson-Pint Apr 24 '19 at 14:27

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 23 '19 at 18:46

1

If you are confident about the API and string format you are going to receive, you can manipulate string as

string.partition(')').last.strip
# => Pacific Time (US & Canada)

answered Apr 23 '19 at 18:46

Md. Farhan Memon

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Thank you, if I cannot find a way to parse the API's Time.zone.to_s back into a Ruby class, then I will go with a string strip solution – kg. Apr 23 '19 at 18:50

Parsing a TimeZone name string that includes GMT offset hours

2 Answers2