How to get user's Timezone in Django 1.3 Http Request

Question

I have read that there is a lot of timezone support available in Django 1.4, but how does one obtain user's timezone in Django 1.3?

Once I have the timezone i.e. something like 'Europe\London' or 'GMT+4:00', it is easy to use a middleware to set it into the request.META dict so that it is available with every request...

Answer 1

The user's timezone isn't normally available to the server. If you look at your own web browser's request headers in something like http://www.myhttp.info/ you'll see there's nothing in there that gives a clue to your timezone.

However, if you can run some Javascript on the client side, you can use the Date class constructor and Date.UTC to examine the difference between local time and UTC on the client. That difference is the current time offset, which is the best you can reliably do.