pytz has so many timezones!

[Nicholas Bastin]

On 10/9/07, Sanjay <skpatel20 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's not clear at all from the OPs post exactly what functionality he
> > is trying to derive from the timezone. Since timezones (obviously)
> > contain more information than just the GMT offset (otherwise we
> > wouldn't even have them), he may very well want to use the timezone
> > given by the user to display correct local time to them. In this case,
> > the actual, correct, political timezone is important, not just the GMT
> > offset.
>
> I am developing a website which would be accessed by members all over
> the world. They can exchange data having some time fields, say
> 'schedule for next meeting'. Whenever somebody feeds some time field,
> my application converts it to UTC and stores in the database. Later,
> when the data is to be displayed to some member, the application
> converts it to his local time, and displays the data.

Yeah, you are, unfortunately, probably going to have to deal with the
entirety of this time zone data in this case.  You can obviously elide
some information for countries you don't intend to support, but
there's no particular reason to exclude a potential market.

I would say the easiest way to get people to choose their own time
zone is to ask them their country, and then filter their choices by
that.  (That would get you down to less than a dozen choices in almost
every country in the world).

--
Nick