CountryTimezone

If you’ve worked with timezones in Python, you’ve probably used pytz to get IANA timezone names for specific countries:

tz_names = pytz.country_timezones.get(country.upper(), [])

When I needed similar functionality in Delphi, I was surprised to find that there wasn’t a readily available library to get IANA timezone names for countries.

After searching without success, I decided to create my own solution:

https://github.com/optinsoft/CountryTimezone

Here’s a practical example that demonstrates how to get a random timezone name and its UTC offset for a given country:

uses CountryTimezone, TZDB;

type
   TTimezoneAndOffset = record
        name: String;
        offset: Integer;
   end;

function GetRandomTimezoneAndOffset(country: String): TTimezoneAndOffset;
var
  LCTZDict: TCountryTimezoneDictionary;
  LCTZList: TStringList;
  tz: TBundledTimeZone;
begin
  LCTZDict := TCountryTimezoneDictionary.Create();
  LCTZList := TStringList.Create;
  try
    LCTZDict.GetCountryTimezones(country, LCTZList);
    Result.name := LCTZList[Random(LCTZList.Count)];
    tz := TBundledTimeZone.GetTimeZone(Result.name);
    Result.offset := Trunc(tz.UtcOffset.TotalMinutes);
  finally
    LCTZList.Free;
    LCTZDict.Free;
  end;
end;

This function:

1. Creates a country timezone dictionary
2. Retrieves all timezone names for the specified country
3. Selects a random timezone from the list
4. Uses TZDB to get the UTC offset in minutes for that timezone