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Calculating start and end of UK summertime

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# 1  
Old 04-27-2011
Calculating start and end of UK summertime
I have a need to calculate when British Summer Time starts and ends. After messing around, the following seems to work in Bash.

Code:
echo `date +%Y`-03-`cal 3 \`date +%Y\` | grep -oE "^[[:digit:]]{2}" | tail 
-1`T01:00:00Z

and

Code:
echo `date +%Y`-03-`cal 10 \`date +%Y\` | grep -oE "^[[:digit:]]{2}" | tail 
-1`T01:00:00Z

Are there better ways? Would this method work for other countries?
# 2  
Old 04-27-2011
Britain gets summer?

I believe ksh93 has some date arithmetic tools. First Sunday after March/Oct 9 at 1 AM? Typo in October, too much March pasted in. I had a lesser grep, so I use sed:
Code:
$ echo `date +%Y`-10-`cal 10 \`date +%Y\` | sed -n 's/^\([0-9]\{2\}\).*/\1/p' | tail -1`T01:00:00Z
2011-10-30T01:00:00Z
$

You can use date as echo, or date once to variable or date once to make a command and eval it. You could call date iterating offsets until it met your template, to drop cal and the cal postprocessing.

Only if they adopt British Summer Time, and then you have to decide the effects of their time zone on date as well as time, and do they match the UK no matter what TZ?
# 3  
Old 04-27-2011
Why not just use zdump and the appropriate timezone file? Look for isdst 1
Code:
zdump -v Europe/London | grep 2011

shows that BST started on March 27th and ends on Oct 30th.
This User Gave Thanks to fpmurphy For This Post:
esb4me
# 4  
Old 04-27-2011
Some zdump can trim themselves:
Code:
zdump -v -c '2011,2011' Europe/London

Still, it begs the question of the need for some utility where you can ask for the dom of a Sunday in Mar 2011 with 9 < dom < 17. I suppose if you took cal apart a bit, it might not be too hard to make a calendar selector utility, maybe just a cal option / enhancement. You might tell it to start at 3/10/2011 and find 1 Sunday.
Last edited by jim mcnamara; 04-28-2011 at 11:32 AM.. Reason: finish code tags
# 5  
Old 04-27-2011
Well British Summer Time is defined as starting on the last Sunday of March and ending on the last Sunday of October. Our timezone setting is therefore explicitly set to:-
Code:
GMT0BST,M3.5.0,M10.5.0

GMT & Britain, of course, being the world standard for time - and quite right too.

One way to get the date would be like this:-
Code:
#!/bin/ksh

read YYYY?"Please enter the year required: "
cal 3 $YYYY|grep -v "^$"|tail -1|read BST_start rest
cal 10 $YYYY|grep -v "^$"|tail -1|read BST_end rest

echo "BST starts on $BST_start/3/$YYYY and ends on $BST_end/10/$YYYY"



Does that help?




Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK - as if you couldn't guess.
# 6  
Old 04-28-2011
Thanks for the replies. I guess the algorithm for summertime changeover varies by country. I didn't know about zdump, you have to browse the zoneinfo directory on your machine to find out what strings to use?
# 7  
Old 05-02-2011
Last, not between 10 and 16?
British Summer Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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