如何在 Swift 中获取日期的时区

Question

I only want to get the current date object's timezone. The Date class in Swift does not have a way to do so. I have seen ways to convert from one timezone to another. But no way to do so extracting the timezone from a date object.

Why is that?

Is there a way to do so? Thoughts on how? Thanks

Answer 1

Dates don't have time zones. They're simply a point in time.

Eg, the moment in which Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. You could describe that moment in UTC, or EST, or any other TZ (or even in other calendar systems), but they're all referring to the same moment . That would be modelled by a singular date object.

By another analogy, an object has a width, but it doesn't know its unit. Its width can be measured in centimetres, inches, plank lengths or light years. These are all abstractions we put on top of the concept of distance, and they all describe the same thing.

Internally, they're just a Double that counts the number of secs since the reference date. Clearly, there's no timezone there.

Any time zones you see relating to dates are just an interpretive layer on top of that (eg print will call .description , which will format it to your local tz for your convenience.).