faker generates unsupported timezones

[rijan0101]

faker generates unsupported timezones

[fzaninotto]

Can you be more specific? Which timezone did it generate that doesn't exist?

[CyrilMazur]

I have the same issue, these two timezones returned by Faker make IntlDateFormatter() crash: Europe/Ulyanovsk and America/Fort_Nelson. There's maybe more, I haven't checked them all.

[CyrilMazur]

Additional info. I noticed some timezones made IntlDateFormatter() crash on my laptop but not in my CI instance. I think what matters is the ICU Data version, which depends on what system you're using. Debian 7 and 8 provide pretty old versions of the ICU data for instance. One solution would be to decrease Faker's list of timezones to just the "safe" ones, ie those who are present in ICU for quite a long time.

[curry684]

those who are present in ICU for quite a long time

It's not exactly a list with daily changes, and taking an old copy is just as likely to trigger results that were renamed or dropped since then as a new list has the other way around.

However the issue makes no sense, as the timezone generator was implemented 5 years ago and works directly on PHP's internal list of supported timezones. There is simply no way it can generate an invalid timezone, unless you're using it in communication with other tooling than PHP itself, which is outside the scope and responsibility of Faker.

[shadowhand]

Same problem here... generating a random list of timezones with faker, and then dumping it, we can end up with this:

php > print_r($randomElements($tzs, 1)[0]);
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [dst] =>
            [offset] => -39600
            [timezone_id] =>
        )

)

[fzaninotto]

I'm afraid this is a PHP bug, since Faker relies on \DateTimeZone::listIdentifiers() to get a list of valid timezones. Please open an issue in the PHP bug tracker instead.