This page fully documents a library to handle time zones in C++11 and C++14.

The library documentation

by Howard Hinnant

From the article:

Introduction

I had just completed writing date, which is a library for extending <chrono> into the realm of calendars, and I was looking around for the most challenging date time problem I could find with which I could demonstrate the power of this new library. "I know," I said to myself, "I'll handle all the world's time zones, and maybe even leap seconds!" Thus began my journey into a rabbit hole which I knew existed, but had never truly appreciated the intricacies of.

This library adds timezone and leap second support to this date library. This is a separate library from date because many clients of date do not need timezone nor leap second support, and this support does not come for free (though the cost is quite reasonable).

This library is a complete parser of the IANA Time Zone Database. This database contains timezone information that represents the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe. It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies to time zone boundaries, UTC offsets, and daylight-saving rules. The database also maintains a list of leap seconds from 1972 through the present.

The IANA Time Zone Database contains four specific types of data:

Zone: A geographic location with a human-readable name (e.g. "America/New_York") which specifies the offset from UTC and an abbreviation for the zone. This data includes daylight saving rules, if applicable, for the zone. This data is not only the rules currently in effect for the region, but also includes specifications dating back to at least 1970, and in most cases dating back to the mid 1800's (when uniform time was first introduced across regions larger than individual towns and cities).

Rule: A specification for a single daylight-saving rule. This helps implement and consolidate the specifications of Zones.

Link: This is an alternative name for a Zone.

Leap: The date of the insertion of a leap second.

The library documented herein provides access to all of this data, and offers efficient and convenient ways to compute with it. And this is all done based on the date library, which in turn is based on the C++11/14 <chrono> library. So once you've learned those fundamental libraries, the learning curve for this library is greatly eased.