The best advice I can give anyone when dealing with Date/Time issues is to remember that a "date" (or a "time") is an abstract moment in space/time ... it doesn't matter whether you are in California, or Indiana; it doesn't matter if you observe Daylight Savings time or not; that moment is the same all over the galaxy.

When you describe that moment in text, or in speech, your description inherently takes into account a "base moment" -- just as if you were describing a physical location and you said it was "20 feet up, and 30 feet west", there is some implicit orrigin in your coordinate space that you are speaking relative to.

When you write the text "June 5th, 2003 at 9:36AM" you are describing a moment in time that assumes: Many of these things are accepted by convention. people assume you are using the Gregorian calender unless you tell them otherwise, they assume you are using standard month names, and standard lengths of a "second" .. but what they don't know is what origin you are using, and what time zone you are using ... that information should be spelled out in your expression of the moment in time as a string.

In your specific case, I would want the API provided to me by the other servers I deal with to make sure that the time is expressed in a format that includes the TimeZone, so I could know without a doubt what they mean.

In reply to Re: Daylight Savings Time twist by hossman
in thread Daylight Savings Time twist by kanwisch

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.