How to convert from UTC to local time in C?

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If you can assume POSIX (and thus the POSIX specification of time_t as seconds since the epoch), I would first use the POSIX formula to convert to seconds since the epoch:

tm_sec + tm_min*60 + tm_hour*3600 + tm_yday*86400 +
    (tm_year-70)*31536000 + ((tm_year-69)/4)*86400 -
    ((tm_year-1)/100)*86400 + ((tm_year+299)/400)*86400

Next, use localtime((time_t []){0}) to get a struct tm representing the epoch in local time. Add the seconds since the epoch to the tm_sec field of this struct tm, then call mktime to canonicalize it.

Edit: Actually the only POSIX dependency is having a known epoch which (time_t)0 corresponds to. Perhaps you can find a way around that if you really need to… for instance using calls to both gmtime and localtime at time_t 0..

Edit 2: A sketch of how to do this:

#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>

long long diff_tm(struct tm *a, struct tm *b)
{
        return a->tm_sec - b->tm_sec
                +60LL*(a->tm_min - b->tm_min)
                +3600LL*(a->tm_hour - b->tm_hour)
                +86400LL*(a->tm_yday - b->tm_yday)
                +(a->tm_year-70)*31536000LL
                -(a->tm_year-69)/4*86400LL
                +(a->tm_year-1)/100*86400LL
                -(a->tm_year+299)/400*86400LL
                -(b->tm_year-70)*31536000LL
                +(b->tm_year-69)/4*86400LL
                -(b->tm_year-1)/100*86400LL
                +(b->tm_year+299)/400*86400LL;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        char buf[100];
        struct tm e0 = { .tm_year = 70, .tm_mday = 1 }, e1, new;
        time_t pseudo = mktime(&e0);
        e1 = *gmtime(&pseudo);
        e0.tm_sec += atoi(argv[1]) - diff_tm(&e1, &e0);
        mktime(&e0);
        strftime(buf, sizeof buf, "%c", &e0);
        puts(buf);
}

Please don’t mind the ugly output code. This program takes an argument in the form of “seconds relative to the POSIX epoch” and outputs the resulting time in local time. You can convert any UTC time to seconds since the epoch using the formula I cited above. Note that this code does not in any way depend on POSIX, but it does assume the offset returned by diff_tm combined with the seconds-since-the-epoch value does not overflow int. A fix for this would be to use a long long offset and a loop that keeps adding increments no larger than INT_MAX/2 (or smaller than INT_MIN/2) and calling mktime to renormalize until the offset reaches 0.

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