After writing a sample code for the question about converting between timezones, one of the comments to it was the need for more general method for converting from timezone A to timezone B. I was curious myself too to have a more high-level primitives for such a manipulations, so I wrote the below code.
One drawback I see is that it constantly wiggles the TZ in the environment variables, changing the notion of 'local time'. While it seems to work (though I did not check on how it react to the DST periods, but since it's based on the Olson database, presumably it should), I was curious if anyone might have some better ideas on how to deal with this task ?
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
time_t utc_now() {
struct timeval tv_utc;
gettimeofday(&tv_utc, NULL);
return tv_utc.tv_sec;
}
void use_tz(char *timezone) {
if(timezone) {
setenv("TZ", timezone, 1);
} else {
unsetenv("TZ");
}
tzset();
}
time_t utc_from_local_tm(struct tm *local_tm, char *timezone) {
time_t utc;
use_tz(timezone);
utc = mktime(local_tm);
return utc;
}
struct tm *local_tm_from_utc(time_t utc, char *timezone) {
use_tz(timezone);
return localtime(&utc);
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
struct tm *tm;
struct tm tm2;
time_t utc, utc2, utc3;
utc = utc_now();
tm = local_tm_from_utc(utc, "Europe/Brussels");
printf("Local time in Brussels now: %s", asctime(tm));
utc2 = utc_from_local_tm(tm, "Europe/Moscow");
tm = local_tm_from_utc(utc2, "UTC");
printf("UTC time if the above was the Moscow local time: %s", asctime(tm));
memset(&tm2, sizeof(tm2), 0);
/* 13:00:00 on 11 dec 2010 */
tm2.tm_sec = tm2.tm_min = 0;
tm2.tm_hour = 13;
tm2.tm_mon = 11;
tm2.tm_mday = 11;
tm2.tm_year = 110;
utc3 = utc_from_local_tm(&tm2, "Europe/Brussels");
printf("Brussels time: %s", asctime(&tm2));
tm = local_tm_from_utc(utc3, "Europe/Moscow");
printf("At 13:00:00 on 11 dec 2010 CET the time in Moscow will be: %s", asctime(tm));
exit(0);
}