various time related problems

[Nathanael Noblet]

Hello,
	I hope that those on this list can help me with a problem I've been trying 
to solve for the last week or so. I found a link to this list in a newsgroup 
post. I don't know if anyone here deals with programming or if this is simply 
to do with date/time standards or what. If I am in the wrong news group just 
let me know.

The Problem:
	In a project I'm taking part in we're building a custom date/time class for 
inclusion in a library. Everything works except a few things we'd like to 
implement. The date class will be used mainly for conversions and such and to 
timestamp certificates for encryption purposes. We're using the standard 
C/C++ library functions for most everything. What I'd like to be able to do 
is give this class a date as a string (similar to an email date) and have it 
convert to a tm struct. The only problem is that I need to take into account 
what timezone the date is in. For instance if I receive an email from someone 
in Japan (I am in Calgary, Canada). The date/time would look like this in the 
headers. Thu, 05 Jul 2001 HH:MM:SS JST. Is there anyway I can get a list of 3 
letter abreviations so to get the JST and convert to an UTC offset? This way 
I can convert between times and such. The regular c/c++ functions do not 
support this coming from a string. Only outputting the timezone info from a 
tm struct to a string.

Any help / ideas with this would be appreciated.

Sincerely,
Nathanael Noblet
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