Pine Script: How to display current time in chart's timezone on label, at every price update?

Question

I am attempting to do something seemingly trivial, but running into all sorts of problems.

I would like to plot certain basic information on a label every time there is an update to the current price--regardless of the timeframe of my chart.

I am able to accurately display volume and price information, however displaying the time has been a challenge.

My first attempt was to use the following code:

if (barstate.islast)
    label.set_text(
         id=myLabel,
         text="\nTime: " + tostring(hour) + ":" + tostring(minute) + ":" + tostring(minute)
         )

I quickly learned that, even though my chart is set to the timezone for New York (i.e., UTC-4), calling tostring(hour) displays the hour of UTC.

Figuring out how to specify that I want it displayed time to correspond to my chart's timezone has been the first major hurdle, and I have tangled endlessly with timestamp() and syminfo.timezone to no avail.

My second major problem is that tostring(second) does not properly display the seconds, even for UTC time.

While working on a 1m chart, I thought I managed to solve this by implementing

tostring((timenow-time)/1000)

However, the seconds do not display properly on different time frames.

This is all in addition to the fact that charts from different exchanges in different time zones will all display time "incorrectly" with respect to UTC time.

It must to be the case that I am missing something fairly basic, since time is such crucial data, but I just can't determine the proper syntax.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

A few different issues are at play here:

1. Pine scripts have no visibility on the chart's timezone you may have selected manually. That only affects the display of the chart.
2. The minute variable returns the minute at the beginning of the bar, so will not change on script iterations in the realtime bar, until a new bar begins. To get the current minute you will need to use an overloaded version of minute where you can specify a timestamp in ms. The timenow built-in variable returns the timestamp for the time of a particular script iteration (that is true in the realtime bar; when the script is running on historical bars, timenow is only updated every second during the script's execution). So you need to use minute(timenow).
3. If you want minute() to return a time in another timezone than the exchange's, you can use a second parameter to specify a timezone, which is what we do in the second example here. In our example you can change the timezone through the script's "Settings/Inputs". Used with the timezone, minute() will look something like:
   minute(timenow, "GMT-4").

//@version=4
study("", "Time", true)
i_timeZone = input("GMT-4")
f_print(_txt) => var _lbl = label.new(bar_index, highest(10)[1], _txt, xloc.bar_index, yloc.price, #00000000, label.style_none, color.gray, size.large, text.align_left), label.set_xy(_lbl, bar_index, highest(10)[1]), label.set_text(_lbl, _txt)

f_print(tostring(hour(timenow), "00:") + tostring(minute(timenow), "00:") + tostring(second(timenow), "00") + " (Exchange)\n")
f_print(tostring(hour(timenow, i_timeZone), "00:") + tostring(minute(timenow, i_timeZone), "00:") + tostring(second(timenow, i_timeZone), "00") + " (Input: " + i_timeZone + ")")