Format date in a specific timezone

javascript timezone momentjs
quietmint picture quietmint · Mar 11, 2013 · Viewed 399.6k times · Source

I'm using Moment.js to parse and format dates in my web app. As part of a JSON object, my backend server sends dates as a number of milliseconds from the UTC epoch (Unix offset).

Parsing dates in a specific timezone is easy -- just append the RFC 822 timezone identifier to the end of the string before parsing:

But how do I format a date in a specifc timezone?

I want consistent results regardless of the browser's current time, but I don't want to display dates in UTC.

Answer

quietmint picture quietmint · May 23, 2013

As pointed out in Manto's answer, .utcOffset() is the preferred method as of Moment 2.9.0. This function uses the real offset from UTC, not the reverse offset (e.g., -240 for New York during DST). Offset strings like "+0400" work the same as before:

// always "2013-05-23 00:55"
moment(1369266934311).utcOffset(60).format('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm')
moment(1369266934311).utcOffset('+0100').format('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm')

The older .zone() as a setter was deprecated in Moment.js 2.9.0. It accepted a string containing a timezone identifier (e.g., "-0400" or "-04:00" for -4 hours) or a number representing minutes behind UTC (e.g., 240 for New York during DST).

// always "2013-05-23 00:55"
moment(1369266934311).zone(-60).format('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm')
moment(1369266934311).zone('+0100').format('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm')

To work with named timezones instead of numeric offsets, include Moment Timezone and use .tz() instead:

// determines the correct offset for America/Phoenix at the given moment
// always "2013-05-22 16:55"
moment(1369266934311).tz('America/Phoenix').format('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm')

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