I want to get the time on the computer of the person who is accessing my website. Should I use getHours() or getUTCHours()?
Short answer is it depends. If you want the hours as it displays on a clock for their timezone you will want getHours() as it returns the hours in their local time. If you want the hours in Universal Time (no timezone adjustment) then use getUTCHours()
I would recommend getUTCHours - keeping everything in UTC removes a lot of headaches when it comes to working with dates and times.
getHours will return the time according to their timezone, getUTCHours will get their time converted to UTC. Would probably be easier to use getUTCHours so everyone is returning their time in the same timezone.
It depends what you're using it for. If you want to get the user's local time, use getHours(). If you want to get something like a time offset (say, "hours until the new CoD is released in the UK"), use getUTCHours() as an absolute reference point. Bear in mind, however, that if the user's clock is set wrong, getUTC*() functions will return times that aren't really UTC - all they do really is remove the getGMTOffset() amount for you.
It depends on what you want to do, but i'd agree with Andrew, if you use getUTC*** it becomes easier for you to handle dates and times
Related
I need to represent date in the format 2021-11-21T00:00:00+00:00 but I get 2021-11-21T00:00:00+05:30. Please help me with this
moment('2021-11-21').format(); //2021-11-21T00:00:00+05:30
I had a similar problem when dealing with dates and birthdays in Golang, but this also applies to Javascript, I'd say. You should not try to use a date object for this task, because you can never fully rely on that when a clients browser is set to a different time zone. I ended up creating a date object myself, consisting only of 3 integers for day, month, year. By doing so you can be sure that time does not play a role at all.
By the way, this might be of interest to others as well: I did some research on how birth dates are handled in general, because when you think about it, your birthday is actually a point in time, so your birthday could change to the previous or the following day, if you look at it from a local perspective. I found out that birthdates (or dates "in general") are not considered as a time or datetime, only the year, month and day are important and they are always the same, regardless of the place/timezone you were born and regardless of the timezone the client lives in.
Instead of using moment, you can use moment-timezone and set it to GMT-0.
var moment = require("moment-timezone");
const time = moment().tz("Etc/GMT").format();
console.log(time);
And the result is something like:
2021-10-26T11:39:15Z
So I think you can't do that (except manually remove the 'Z' and add the +00:00) part as an extra string.
All dates are represented in your system local timezone. This means that moment('2021-11-21') is midnight of November 21st in your timezone (2021-11-21T00:00:00+05:30). If I run the exact same method then it will be local for my timezone (2021-11-21T00:00:00-06:00). If you need this to be in a specific timezone, or in GMT, then you probably want to use moment-timezone and cast the date to that timezone.
moment('2021-11-21').startOf('day').format()
I'm using momentjs lib to updated text on some ajax action. What I need to do is to set a current date & time in london. I'm using moment.utc() function but because of the summer time I'm one hour out.
For example running this on 14:26
console.log( moment.utc().format('HH:mm:ss') );
I'm getting 13:26:53.
Any idea on how to fix this?
Can you use momentJS timezone?
moment().tz('Europe/London');
EDIT: In case you try to use this without seeing the link, it's a separate library you have to include.
If you want the local time instead of the UTC time, just use moment() instead of moment.utc(). You're specifically asking for UTC, so you shouldn't be surprised when you get UTC :)
From the documentation:
By default, moment parses and displays in local time.
If you want to parse or display a moment in UTC, you can use moment.utc() instead of moment().
This brings us to an interesting feature of Moment.js. UTC mode.
While in UTC mode, all display methods will display in UTC time instead of local time.
This is assuming you always want the user's local time. If you want a specific time zone (London) which may not be the user's time zone and isn't UTC, then you should use the library indicated by Takuya's answer. I would think carefully before doing so though - while it may be a sensible approach, you should at least validate that first. It's often reasonable to display a time for user U1 in the time zone of user U2 - but here you're using a fixed time zone. That's only appropriate if you know that U2 will always be in London. It would be really confusing if actually U2 is in some other zone - either the same as or different to U1.
I need to get a timezone from a time, date is not important, but daylight savings is.
something like:
timezone = function("15:00");
Is there a simple way to do this?
I dont think you can get the timezone from the time but you might get some help from Date.prototype.getTimezoneOffset()
The getTimezoneOffset() method returns the time-zone offset from UTC,
in minutes, for the current locale.
Example:
var x = new Date();
var currentTimeZoneOffsetInHours = x.getTimezoneOffset() / 60;
No, of course not. Think about it, you're passing 15:00 to that function, presumable denoting it's 3PM. But in what timezone is it 3 PM? No way of knowing. It's like me saying it's quarter to, without saying what hour it's quarter to to.
The only way you can get a timezone in JS is by using the Date object, but that just shows the timezone of the machine on which your code is running, nothing about the TZ that "created" the time you're processing.
Also note that daylight saving isn't a global phenomenon, quite the contrary. AFAIKT, there isn't a single time-zone where DST has always been in place...
In order to get TimeZone information you need more than a Date (and an offset). You need a location.
Javascript does not know the location that it resides in but it does know the current offset from UTC. That is different than a Time Zone. The daylight savings time issue play havoc with this key difference.
This has posed problems when dealing with server applications that know their timezone and report dates as being in a specific Time Zone.
My rule of thumb has been fairly simple in this regard.
Always use Long or long (a 64 bit number) to store, pass and process dates times or intervals, only convert to Date, Calendar or DateTime objects when interacting with people.
Once you have a date object, such as with new Date(), you can use .getTimezoneOffset() to get the number of minutes between the date's object and UTC, which is timezone information you can use.
I've been digging through as many things as I can find, and I can't seem to find what it is I am looking for, so I am coming to the conclusion that I either don't know what I am looking for or its not possible. Either way..
What I am trying to achieve is taking a timestamp example: 1373439600000 and a given offset of -12 to 12 (is that correct, as far as range goes?) so I can then take that timestamp above subtract from it accordingly, and pass that new timestamp to the Date() function so I can then manipulate it for human readable display.
The offset is two part, It is user specified in one instance while in the other it is going to default to the local getTimezoneOffset() if not specified. So trying to figure out how to take that range and work with that. To do everything accordingly.
Ideas? Am I even approaching this in a correct manor?
The timestamps I am working with are already UTC, not sure of that makes a difference.
The JavaScript Date type has many problems, but one of its major quirks is that it only understands two time zones - UTC, or Local. It uses UTC internally and in certain properties and functions like .toUTCString(), but otherwise it uses the local time zone.
Many browsers will accept an offset when parsing a Date from a string, but that will just be used to set the UTC time. Anything on the way out will be converted back to the local time zone again.
Fortunately, there are some great libraries out there for working around these problems. Moment.js is perfectly suited for this. Here is an example of what you might be looking for:
moment(1373439600000).zone(8).format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss Z")
// output: "2013-07-09 23:00:00 -08:00"
Of course, you can format as needed, or pass in a more complex zone offset like "+05:30". And if you need to use an actual IANA time zone, there is the moment-timezone companion project, which you could do something like this:
moment(1373439600000).tz('America/New_York').format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss Z")
// output: "2013-07-10 03:00:00 -04:00"
Unfortunately the Date object does not provide may facilities for working with timezones. If you have the offset though, you should be able to compute the offset in milliseconds. Then you can add (subtract?) that value to your timestamp and use it to construct the appropriate Date.
Does that help?
I am a bit confused with this, i know the code gives me the time difference from GMT, but for which city or country? How do i get the time difference between gmt and the time in Kabul Afghanistan.
var now = new Date();
alert(now.getTimezoneOffset());
The difference is the value showing in the alert.
It gives you the offset of the client local time zone.
To get the offset of different time zone, use external libraries as stated here, or just get the offset manually and use it, as explained here.