timezone - Get the official American time zone in PHP?

Question

I have account stored in my database and I have each account state on file, from there I want to link each account to a timezone based on the account state.

so if the account's state is California then the timezone will be "America/Los_Angeles"

More, I want to break down the time zone that is provided at this page http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.america.php by Atlantic Eastern Central Mountain Pacific Alaska Hawaii - Aleutian

Now I will be able to sort my data based on 7 time zones and also I can have all my account linked to a timezone so I can determine their time zone.

So My question 1) How can I figure out what state is linked to what timezone. (example: California = "America/Los_Angeles")

2) Which timezone are linked to what timezone category. (example: California = Pacific)

Answer 1

You haven't thought this through.

Many US states have multiple time zones. For example, South Dakota has both Mountain and Central time zones.

If you desire to resolve a location to a time zone, you will need a much more granular location. Ideally, a latitude and longitude. If you don't have one, you can approximate the centroid lat/lon of a zip code, and then use that against any of many various services or databases that will resolve that to a time zone. But be very careful, not all zip codes represent physical locations, and zip codes change frequently.