---
title: "Rails 5 introduces country_zones helper method"
description:
  "Rails 5 now allows to fetch information about all the timezones in a
  particular country by introductin of a new helper method."
canonical_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-5-introduces-helpers-for-country-zones"
markdown_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-5-introduces-helpers-for-country-zones.md"
---

# Rails 5 introduces country_zones helper method

Rails 5 now allows to fetch information about all the timezones in a particular
country by introductin of a new helper method.

- Author: Mohit Natoo
- Published: June 1, 2016
- Categories: Rails 5, Rails

Before Rails 5, we could fetch all time zones for US by using `us_zones` method
as follows.

```ruby

> puts ActiveSupport::TimeZone.us_zones.map(&:to_s)
(GMT-10:00) Hawaii
(GMT-09:00) Alaska
(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-07:00) Arizona
(GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-05:00) Indiana (East)

```

Such functionality of getting all the `TimeZone` objects for a country was
implemented only for one country, US.

The `TimeZone` class internally uses the `TzInfo` gem which does have an api for
providing timezones for all the countries.

Realizing this, the Rails community decided to
[introduce a helper method country_zones](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/20625)
to `ActiveSupport::TimeZone` class that is able to fetch a collection of
`TimeZone` objects belonging to a country specified by its ISO 3166-1 Alpha2
code.

```ruby

> puts ActiveSupport::TimeZone.country_zones('us').map(&:to_s)
(GMT-10:00) Hawaii
(GMT-09:00) Alaska
(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-07:00) Arizona
(GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
(GMT-05:00) Indiana (East)

>puts ActiveSupport::TimeZone.country_zones('fr').map(&:to_s)
 (GMT+01:00) Paris

```

## Links

- [Human page](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-5-introduces-helpers-for-country-zones)