Get a list of valid time zones in Go

Question

I'd like to write a method that will populate a Go Language array with the common timezones that are accepted by the time.Format() call, for use in an HTML template (Form select to allow them to read and choose their timezone). Is there a common way to do this?

Answer 1

To get a list of time zones, you can use something like:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"
    "strings"
)

var zoneDirs = []string{
    // Update path according to your OS
    "/usr/share/zoneinfo/",
    "/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/",
    "/usr/lib/locale/TZ/",
}

var zoneDir string

func main() {
    for _, zoneDir = range zoneDirs {
        ReadFile("")
    }
}

func ReadFile(path string) {
    files, _ := ioutil.ReadDir(zoneDir + path)
    for _, f := range files {
        if f.Name() != strings.ToUpper(f.Name()[:1]) + f.Name()[1:] {
            continue
        }
        if f.IsDir() {
            ReadFile(path + "/" + f.Name())
        } else {
            fmt.Println((path + "/" + f.Name())[1:])
        }
    }
}

output:

Africa/Abidjan
Africa/Accra
Africa/Addis_Ababa
Africa/Algiers
Africa/Asmara
Africa/Asmera
Africa/Bamako
Africa/Bangui
...