Re: valid timezone abbreviations/displaying timezone value?

[Stephan Szabo <sszabo(at)megazone23(dot)bigpanda(dot)com>]

On Fri, 16 May 2003, Aditya wrote:

> I have a timestamp column that I'd like to display in a user-defined timezone
> with:
>
>   select updated at time zone $TZONE from page;
>
> where $TZONE is a PG-valid timezone abbreviations.
>
> 1) Does anyone have a list of valid timezone abbreviations?

The best one I know of is in the source
(src/backend/utils/adt/datetime.c).

> 2) Is there a way to get the timezone to display in the above select for each
> row returned? (it only shows if I don't specify the time zone)

I can't think of one that actually works.

> In general, "at time zone foo" seems to be a rather poorly documented command
> -- the only mention I can easily find is in the _Practical Postgresql_ book,
> where it says "PostgreSQL supports the use of all ISO standard time zone
> abbreviations" (p.76). That would be helpful if I could find a list of
> standard ISO time zone abbrevs -- Google yielded
> http://greenwichmeantime.com/info/timezone.htm which doesn't have abbrevs for
> all timezones and PG doesn't seem to accept timezones in 'GMT+X' notation...

In 7.4, I seem to be able to say at time zone interval 'n hours'.  It
seems to do wierd things in 7.3, I think there was an issue with a
function returning the wrong type.