JSTZ


Timezone detection for JavaScript

What

This library allows you to detect a user's timezone from within their browser. It is often useful to use JSTZ in combination with a timezone parsing library such as [Moment Timezone][].

This library is an unofficial fork of [pellepim/jstimezonedetect][jstimezonedetect]. The original library works well and can be used via [CDN][], but it was not configured to work with NPM. This meant the library was less accessible because it could not be retrieved with a simple npm command or included as a dependency in package.json. Thus this fork was born.

Sidenote: If you're wondering why this isn't an actual GitHub fork it's because the original project uses Mercurial and is hosted on BitBucket.

Why

Dealing with timezones can be a pain. Libraries like [Moment Timezone][] help a lot with the parsing side of things, but if you want to _detect_ the users timezone you would normally have to do it manually. That's where this library comes in.

Usage

``
$ npm install --save jstz
`

In your JS file:

`js
import jstz from 'jstz';
const timezone = jstz.determine();
timezone.name(); // => 'America/Los_Angeles' (or whatever your user's timezone is)
`

Or if you prefer ES5:

`js
var jstz = require('jstz');
var timezone = jstz.determine();
timezone.name(); // => 'America/Los_Angeles' (or whatever your user's timezone is)
`

Note: If you're not using a module system such as Webpack or Browserify then I recommend you use the original library delivered via CDNJS:

`html



`

Docs

To learn more about the library head on over to the original library's repo:

Use With Rails

jstz is an excellent library to use by Rails to determine the time zone of the browser (e.g. the gem browser-timezone-rails), but some extra tweaking is necessary to make them play nicely together.

A common use case is to provide a time zone select (f.time_zone_select) where it defaults to the user's current time zone. That Rails helper uses ActiveSupport::TimeZone, which provides a more human-readable subset of the time zones (e.g. Eastern Time (US & Canada) instead of America/New_York). jstz doesn't know about this subset, so we need to use the TZInfo associated with those ActiveSupport::TimeZones to have a correct translation.

This method could go on your base application controller, assuming you're setting a browser cookie browser_time_zone:

`ruby


Returns the client's time zone based on a cookie set by the browser, defaults to application time zone


def browser_time_zone
browser_tz = ActiveSupport::TimeZone.find_tzinfo(cookies[:browser_time_zone])
ActiveSupport::TimeZone.all.find { |zone| zone.tzinfo == browser_tz } || Time.zone
rescue TZInfo::UnknownTimezone, TZInfo::InvalidTimezoneIdentifier
Time.zone
end
`

Then in the view you could do something like:

`erb
<%= f.time_zone_select :time_zone, ActiveSupport::TimeZone.us_zones,
default: browser_time_zone.name %>
`

Further complicating matters, jstz uses the forward-thinking window.Intl, which has an awareness of time zones other than what is in Rails, so time zones such as America/Montreal from Intl will not be found in Rails. If you're using jstz with Rails, you will want to tempoarily "silence" the use of Intl when reading from jstz. Here's a code snippet:

`js
export function findTimeZone() {
const oldIntl = window.Intl
try {
window.Intl = undefined
const tz = jstz.determine().name()
window.Intl = oldIntl
return tz
} catch (e) {
// sometimes (on android) you can't override intl
return jstz.determine().name()
}
}
``

Credits (from the original README.md)

Thanks to

- [Josh Fraser][5] for the original idea
- [Brian Donovan][6] for making jstz CommonJS compliant
- [Ilya Sedlovsky][7] for help with namespacing
- [Jordan Magnuson][9] for adding to cdnjs, documentation tags, and for reporting important issues
- [Matt Johnson][11] for adding support for the Internationalization API

Other contributors:
[Gilmore Davidson][8]

[jstimezonedetect]: https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect
[CDN]: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/jstimezonedetect
[Moment Timezone]: http://momentjs.com/timezone/

[1]: http://www.iana.org/time-zones
[3]: https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect/src
[4]: https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt
[5]: http://www.onlineaspect.com/about/
[6]: https://bitbucket.org/eventualbuddha
[7]: https://bitbucket.org/purebill
[8]: https://bitbucket.org/gdavidson
[9]: https://github.com/JordanMagnuson
[11]: https://bitbucket.org/mj1856