Make Rails ignore daylight saving time when displaying a date

Question

I have a date stored in UTC in my Rails app and am trying to display it to a user who has \"Eastern Time (US & Canada)\" as their timezone. The problem is t

Answer 1

Create a helper that utilizes the dst? method on TimeZone to check whether the passed timezone is currently in DST. If it is, then subtract an hour from the supplied DateTime instance:

# helper function
module TimeConversion
  def no_dst(datetime, timezone)
    Time.zone = timezone

    if Time.zone.now.dst?
        return datetime - 1.hour
    end

    return datetime
  end
end

Then, render the adjusted (or non-adjusted) time in your view:

# in your view
<%= no_dst(DateTime.parse("2013-08-26T00:00:00Z"), 'Eastern Time (US & Canada)') %>
#=> Sun, 25 Aug 2013 19:00:00 EDT -04:00