zip-to-tz

zip-to-tz

This is a re-implementation of DoubleDor's node-zipcode-to-timezone, but optimized for space so that you can use it in the browser with less bloat.

We utilize the same source data in zipcodes.json and generate a map of only the upperbounds. The numercially ordered zipcodes (indexes into timezone-map.json), don't produce timezone indexes that are strictly monotonically increasing (for obvious reasons), so while this isn't a perfect solution, the Gzipped size of the optimized zipcode map is 2.8% of the original Gzipped zipcode map.

Since we don't have an exhaustive list of all zipcodes, we use a binary search function to find where the zipcode lies within the map of upper bounds and return the result.

This module assumes that the zipcode is valid. The original module returned undefined for unknown or invalid zipcodes, because we don't have an exhaustive list, we'll return a timezone for potentially invalid zipcodes.

This module basically trades space for time as the lookup isn't a direct attribute read, but a binary search of the optimized zipcode map keys until we find what range the target zipcode lies in.

	entries	size	size (gzipped)
zipcodes map	41962	672KB	107KB
upper bounded map	1026	14KB	3KB

e.g. Instead of:

{
  ...
  '11111': 0,
  '11112': 0,
  ...
  '11914': 0,
  '11915': 1,
  '11916': 0,
  '11917': 1,
  '11918': 0,
  '11919': 1,
  '11920': 1,
  ...
  '13587': 1,
  '13588': 1,
  '13589': 2,
  '13590': 2,
  ...
  '15623': 2,
  '13624': 2,
  '13625': 3,
  '13626': 3,
  ...
}

We'd keep track of:

  ...
  '11914': 0,
  '11915': 1,
  '11916': 0,
  '11917': 1,
  '11918': 0,
  '13588': 1,
  '13624': 2,
  '13625': //wherever 3 ends
  ...

Installation

npm install --save zip-to-tz

Usage

var zipToTz = require( 'zip-to-tz' );

var tz = zipToTz( '94110' );
console.log( tz ); // America/Los_Angeles

Other info

This project uses the timezone list found here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/zip2timezone/files/