Can we determine time zone from a US address?

[supp]

Is it possible to determine the time zone given a US address? If anyone has done this would you be willing to share your code?

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

You may have the SASHELP.ZIPCODE data set. That has Timezone name for the 5 digit Zip code if you have that as part of your address. Or the same data set has most city and town names (not many cross time zones). If you do not have that set you can find it at https://support.sas.com/rnd/datavisualization/mapsonline/html/misc.html click on the Current under the Archive to get the link to the newest version. Follow the instructions to import into SAS. It is worth updating this set at least once per year.

Note that the ZIP value in the SASHELP.ZIPCODE data set is numeric. So comparisons may need to convert your value if a character zip.

One example:

data have;
   input zip ;
   format zip z5.;
datalines;
00501
31044
;

proc sql;
   create table want as
   select a.*, b.timezone
   from have as a
        left join
        sashelp.zipcode as b
        on a.zip=b.zip;
quit;