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ezic/README.md

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ezic
====
ezic is a set of erlang utilities for the Olsen timezone database files. See the [tz database](http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm) page for more information.
API
---
* `ezic:localtime(TimeZone) -> datetime()`
* `ezic:utc_to_time(universal_datetime(), TimeZone) -> local_datetime()`
* `ezic:utc_from_time(local_datetime(), TimeZone) -> universal_datetime()`
* `ezic:zone_convert(from_datetime(), TimeZoneFrom, TimeZoneTo) -> to_datetime()`
Admin API
-------
* `ezic:load("/path/to/tzdata") -> ok`
Setup
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# download the timezone data files
wget 'ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata*.tar.gz'
tar -xvzf tzdata*.tar.gz -C /path/to/tzdata
# remove a few troublesome files
cd /path/to/tzdata
rm *.sh *.tab factory
# build and run ezic
make all run
1> ezic:load("/path/to/tzdata").
2> ezic:localtime("Australia/Adelaide").
Purpose
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The [recommended way](http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2006-December/024291.html) of handling timezones in erlang involves setting the system environment variable `TZ` to the desired timezone, then calling erlang time functions. This technique has a few key issues:
* it only works on *nix systems,
* it depends on your system's timezone data (preventing custom timezone hackery), and
* you can create race conditions if you aren't careful
A self-containted erlang solution would avoid these pitfalls, but to be fair, it introduces a few others:
* you (the admin) are responsible for updating the timezone database yourself
* ezic has not yet been battle tested
I think both of these issues will disappear over time, so I opted to write ezic.
License
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This project is in the public domain.