Display local timezone not GMT offset

Asked Oct 29 '16 at 15:45

Active Oct 29 '16 at 15:45

Viewed 28 times

I'm in England during daylight savings time (known locally as BST "British Summer Time"). I want my app to display the time with a suffix identifying the BST timezone (e.g. 12:45 BST). The code below should do this but displays the GMT offset instead:

let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "HH:mm z"
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(identifier: "Europe/London")
print(formatter.string(from: Date()))

This displays: 12:45 GMT+1

The reason for this is presumably because "the system" thinks that GMT+1 is the correct abbreviation. For example:

dump(TimeZone(identifier: "Europe/London"))

prints the following:

▿ Optional(Europe/London (current))
  ▿ some: Europe/London (current)
    - identifier: "Europe/London"
    - kind: "current"
    ▿ abbreviation: Optional("GMT+1")
      - some: "GMT+1"
    - secondsFromGMT: 3600
    - isDaylightSavingTime: true

Question: Is there a form of timezone identifier that correctly yields "BST" as the correct abbreviation for British Summer Time?

asked Oct 29 '16 at 15:45

Vince O'Sullivan

2,611
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Use TimeZone.current – LC 웃 Oct 29 '16 at 15:59
2

Similar question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21633173/nsdateformatter-for-bst-instead-of-gmt1. – Martin R Oct 29 '16 at 16:00
Side note - there is no reason to set the formatter's `timeZone` if you want to use the current timezone of the device. – rmaddy Oct 29 '16 at 16:06
Thanks Martin. That question contains the solution. – Vince O'Sullivan Oct 29 '16 at 16:21

Display local timezone not GMT offset

0 Answers0