Building WML Gadgets: World Time Clock

Searching for Time Zones

Next, we need the ability to search for a particular time zone. Adding a variable, "findzone", and a simple substring search accomplishes this goal:

Listing: tztest.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Time::ZoneInfo ':all';
use Date::Calc ':all';

my $findzone = (shift @ARGV);

• Post a comment
• Email Article
• Print Article
• Share Articles
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Slashdot
  • DZone
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Facebook
  • FriendFeed
  • Furl
  • Newsvine
  • Google
  • LinkedIn
  • MySpace
  • Technorati
  • Twitter
  • Windows Live
  • YahooBuzz

my $zones = Time::ZoneInfo->new();

foreach my $zone ($zones->zones) {
  if ((index uc($zone), uc($findzone)) != -1) {

  $ENV{TZ} = $zone;
  ($year,$month,$day,$hour,$min,$sec, $doy,$dow,$dst) =
    System_Clock();
  print $zone.":";

  print $year."-".$month."-".$day." ";
  print $hour.":".$min.":".$sec."\n";
  }
}

Note the use of the IF statement. We uppercase both the zone and the findzone variables to help ensure a match (if "asia" is entered, it will still match all "Asia" entries). For example, running the script with this entry:

./tztest.pl pacific

displays the following:

Pacific/Easter: 2002-12-29  23:40:20
Pacific/Galapagos: 2002-12-29  22:40:20
Pacific/Yap: 2002-12-30  14:40:20
Pacific/Truk: 2002-12-30  14:40:20
Pacific/Ponape: 2002-12-30  15:40:20
Pacific/Kosrae: 2002-12-30  15:40:20
Pacific/Tarawa: 2002-12-30  16:40:20
Pacific/Enderbury: 2002-12-30  17:40:20
Pacific/Kiritimati: 2002-12-30  18:40:20
Pacific/Majuro: 2002-12-30  16:40:20
Pacific/Kwajalein: 2002-12-30  16:40:20
Pacific/Auckland: 2002-12-30  17:40:20
Pacific/Chatham: 2002-12-30  18:25:20
Pacific/Tahiti: 2002-12-29  18:40:20
Pacific/Marquesas: 2002-12-29  19:10:20
Pacific/Gambier: 2002-12-29  19:40:20
Pacific/Johnston: 2002-12-29  18:40:20
Pacific/Midway: 2002-12-29  17:40:20
Pacific/Wake: 2002-12-30  16:40:20
Pacific/Honolulu: 2002-12-29  18:40:20

Suppose that the user doesn't know what time zone he/she is looking for. For example, Pacific/Honolulu covers Hawaii, but isn't necessarily intuitive to someone looking for "Hawaii." To help the user, we will add "ALL" as a valid search that returns all zones. To do so, we doctor the IF statement accordingly:

if (((index uc($zone), uc($findzone)) != -1) ||
    ("uc($findzone)" eq "ALL" )) {

Now, if the user enters "ALL" for the search, he/she will get all known zones.