how many time zones are there?

Question

I'm not sure whether this is an SO question but still would like to know the answer.

Wikipedia says there are about 40 time zones, but when I invoke the TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones() method in c# it returns a list of 101 elements.

Is the wiki article outdated (though it "was last modified on 26 April 2012 at 05:11") or are there any additional time zones?

Answer 1

There's no one answer - it depends on what time zone database you're interested in. Using TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones will use the Windows time zones... if you use tzdb you're likely to see a lot more.

(The current Noda Time version returns 575 time zone IDs, for example, although that includes Etc/GMT+9, Etc/GMT+10 etc.)