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by chillfox 1898 days ago
UTC offset is way more useful than those 3-4 character timezone abbreviations.

Just have a look at the list from Wikipedia [1] and notice how many repeats there are.

As an example AMT could be either UTC+4 or UTC-4.

And this doesn't even includes the various local acronyms that people use around the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zone_abbreviation...

2 comments

I didn't downvote you, but just for reference the time zone abbreviations you are supposed to use are in the tzdata db, and are listed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

If you don't use these, you will inevitably be somewhat wrong due to leap issues, political changes in time, or the like.

Political zones are not the same thing as the abbreviated zones.

IANA time zone identifiers are fully-qualified and unambiguous like America/Los_Angeles or Asia/Kolkata.

Thanks, I have never heard the term “political zones” before, so I made an assumption.