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Finding the time zone of an address?

This seems like the perfect utility to achieve something I've been thinking about in a web app I'm working on.

I have a web app where people enter the address and time zone of the house they live in. I was thinking it would be nice to automatically detect their time zone based on their address, but since time zones are separated on county lines, I realized this was going to be a difficult undertaking. It seems like I could achieve this with Yahoo! Placemaker, but I may be misunderstanding.

Is this possible? Given a street address, can I use Yahoo! Placemaker to find its timezone? If so, how?

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  • QUOTE (jaked409 @ May 25 2009, 11:58 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
    This seems like the perfect utility to achieve something I've been thinking about in a web app I'm working on.

    I have a web app where people enter the address and time zone of the house they live in. I was thinking it would be nice to automatically detect their time zone based on their address, but since time zones are separated on county lines, I realized this was going to be a difficult undertaking. It seems like I could achieve this with Yahoo! Placemaker, but I may be misunderstanding.

    Is this possible? Given a street address, can I use Yahoo! Placemaker to find its timezone? If so, how?


    Hi, I would imagine Yahoo! GeoPlanet is a better tool for doing it. Please go here: http://www.transpomans.com/yplaces/ and type, say, "Vladivostok" (town name) into the edit box on your left. Then select most granular object in the list below (that'll be Vladivostok in this case) and hit "Belongs" button. It'll display a number of WOEIDs Vladivostok belongs to; for every WOEID which falls completely within one time zone there will be an object of type Time Zone, for this example it'll be Asia/Vladivostok. Identical approach applies for any other example (try "90210" or "125 Shaftesbury Ave London UK WC2H 8AD" or anything else).
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  • QUOTE (jaked409 @ May 25 2009, 11:58 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
    [...]

    Is this possible? Given a street address, can I use Yahoo! Placemaker to find its timezone? If so, how?


    Note that Placemaker will not resolve to street address level -- a zip or town is the best you'll get.

    Pass the user given address to Placemaker -- hopefully that will give you one place. Take the woeid from that place and ask GeoPlanet about the belongsto items
    (c.f. http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/g...-reference.html ). You can pass a type filter to get only timezones back. Every location should have one such timezone so that should work.
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