Get the official American time zone in PHP? - php

Question

I have account stored in my database and I have each account state on file, from there I want to link each account to a timezone based on the account state.
so if the account's state is California then the timezone will be "America/Los_Angeles"
More, I want to break down the time zone that is provided at this page http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.america.php by
Atlantic
Eastern
Central
Mountain
Pacific
Alaska
Hawaii - Aleutian
Now I will be able to sort my data based on 7 time zones and also I can have all my account linked to a timezone so I can determine their time zone.
So My question
1) How can I figure out what state is linked to what timezone. (example: California = "America/Los_Angeles")
2) Which timezone are linked to what timezone category. (example: California = Pacific)

Answer 1

You haven't thought this through.
Many US states have multiple time zones. For example, South Dakota has both Mountain and Central time zones.
If you desire to resolve a location to a time zone, you will need a much more granular location. Ideally, a latitude and longitude. If you don't have one, you can approximate the centroid lat/lon of a zip code, and then use that against any of many various services or databases that will resolve that to a time zone. But be very careful, not all zip codes represent physical locations, and zip codes change frequently.

Answer 2

It's always best to go to the source:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.america.php
For all timezones:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
If you read down the page on the first link, someone was nice enough to make an array if you need the abbreviations:
$aTimeZones = array(
'America/Puerto_Rico'=>'AST',
'America/New_York'=>'EDT',
'America/Chicago'=>'CDT',
'America/Boise'=>'MDT',
'America/Phoenix'=>'MST',
'America/Los_Angeles'=>'PDT',
'America/Juneau'=>'AKDT',
'Pacific/Honolulu'=>'HST',
'Pacific/Guam'=>'ChST',
'Pacific/Samoa'=>'SST',
'Pacific/Wake'=>'WAKT',
);