Moment JS - parse UTC and convert to Local and vice versa [duplicate] - momentjs

This question already has answers here:
moment.js - UTC does not work as i expect it
(2 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I have gone through the documentation and am a tiny bit confused about how to proceed.
There are similar questions, but none talk about parsing particular dates received in formats and swapping between local and utc dates.
I receive a local datetime, local datetime format and need to generate utc datetime from it in a particular format and this is how I think I should do it. moment(dateTime,localDateTimeFormat).utc().format(specifiedFormat);
I receive utc datetime in a particular format and have to generate locale specific datetime in a particular format. How do i do it?
moment.utc(utcDateTime, utcDateTimeFormat).toDate(); gives me javascript date i believe. How do I format it then?? Do I have to create a new moment using the generated Date object?
Another thing I could do would be getting the timezone and then formatting. I wonder if I am taking the wrong route here. Please help.

On Item 1 - Yes, that's one way to do it. However, if the output format is just going to be an ISO8601 UTC timestamp, then you can call toISOString directly on the original moment. Since UTC is implied by the output, it would be redundant to call utc() again.
On Item 2 - Just like the utc() function, there's also a local() function. Once you have a moment object, you can use toDate or format or any other of the functions described in the documentation. No, you do not need to create a new moment using the generated date object.
moment.utc(utcDateTime, utcDateTimeFormat).local().format(specifiedFormat)
Again, there's more than one way to do things here. If the utcDateTime is already in ISO8601 format, and contains either a Z or an offset like -01:00, then that will be taken into account and you can simply do this:
moment(utcDateTime).format(specifiedFormat)
On the last item you mentioned about time zones, it's difficult to tell what you are asking. You should elaborate with specific details in a new question.

Related

Allow some exceptions / special cases in the date validation with moment.js

We use moment.js as our date validation, and it works great.
We also use it in custom Angular controls, with date format strings. Very difficult stuff, but easy with moment.js.
However, we run in the situation that we want to allow '00-12-1980' as input for our date control (read below if you want to know why), where 00 is the day, and 12 is the month. Also '00-00-1980' and '00-00-0000' must be valid. (or 00/00/0000 if the format string is D/M/YYYY, etc)
Now in moment.js these dates are marked invalid, and I also didn't find any way to check these dates with moment.js with some sort of addition "Yeah, I know 00 is weird for a daynumber, but just allow it". Or say new moment('00-00-1980', 'D-M-YYYY') and then ask "what is the daynumber?" to do some validation later myself.
So without moment, I have to do all the parsing (including date format strings) myself, and that is a lot of work, and error prone too. So my question is: can I somehow work with moment.js and also allow these kind of dates?
So you wondered why we want to allow the odd dates of '00-00-1980'? It's becasue it's a search field, and the source system (official government sources) has these dates, from the goold old times when this input was allowed.

Safest way to write a time (datetime)

I have a server application that is making calls to a google spreadsheet to write some values. What is the safest format I should use to write a date to a spreadsheet safely so it is interpreted as a (date)time appropriately ?
For instance if my application writes a date in the iso format 8601 format, the date won't be parsed by google spreadsheet, 2019-06-11T15:57:30+02:00 is interpreted as text and then I would need to resort to questions like this one.
On the opposite, writing 2019-06-11 15:57:30 does work, yet I am losing the information of the time zone, and the actual time I wanted to write was 2019-06-11 13:57:30 +0.
What format should I use to write DateTime objects in Google spreadsheets?
Do you recommend systematically converting to UTC and then applying format like YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS +TZ?
I want to highlight that I'm working in an international context, (mainly in France) and I want to avoid confusing formats (like dd-mm-yyyy vs mm-dd-yyyy) and retain timezone information if possible.
Had the same problem some time ago.
Unfortunately G-Sheets does not recognize timezones in the date/time fields. If you do need it for processing, you need to store it as a text, or UTC time + another column for the time zone.

SQLite date compare

How do I compare dates in SQLite database which are stored in DD-MMM-YYYY format e.g. 10-OCT-2017?
I want to compare dates and select rows of particular date and adjacent dates.
Short answer:
Painfully. You must convert the datestring, particularly the character month, into a numeric value, then you can compare the date values.
... Or more easily, by storing your dates using a format like “2018-01-01” which can be natively compared within the SQL via SQLite date functions.
Longer Answer
This page shows all the SQLite SQL date-time functions available. None of them produce or manipulate character month values. So your options are:
1) Select a group of records via SQL into a dataset; and then use your programming language to convert the date values in the dataset to a format whose values are comparable; then compare them.
This would have poor performance for anything except very small data queries, but would probably be reasonably simple to implement, and have no data conversion necessary. (To specifically answer the question you asked, this is the best solution for an app selecting few and small datasets.)
2) Create a SQLite function to do the date format conversion. To do that, you use SQLite's C API. See more how-to discussion here.
I haven't done this myself, and I wouldn’t recommend this route just due to the learning curve, but also due to the type & purpose of SQLite and its capabilities. (To specifically answer the question you asked, this is the best solution for not few and not small datasets.)
3) (This option does not answer your specific question) Convert your stored date values to a natively SQL comparable format. Like: “2018-01-01”. Then you can use the SQLite date-time functions for adjacent date comparisons.
Sample:
select mySQLTableDate, myOtherSQLTableDate
date(mySQLTableDate,'+1 day'), -- YYYY-DD-MM stored format
date(strftime('%Y-%m-%d', mySQLTableDate),'+1 day') -- many stored formats
from mySQLTable
where select mySQLTableDate = date(myOtherSQLTableDate,'+1 day')
Answering your question in terms of the goal rather than the specific question :) , my recommendation is to Use This Solution, especially if you are scanning a lot of data. See more about SQLite Date types here, but for dates with no time, I just store them as the string “2018-01-01”. I’m working with .js, and this is very simple to convert to/from a .js Date object.

Range query on Date value in DocumentDB

According to this article, it's best to convert Date into Epoch time in order to use it is range query in DocumentDB. However, as recently the range query on Sting values has been added to DocumentDB, it is necessary to do convert date-time to epoch (as long as all date-time values have the same format and are in UTC format)?
This is similar to this question, where the accepted answer suggests using strings as you point out.
But to answer your question more specifically, DocumentDB cannot store JavaScript Date objects because it only stores pure JSON and Date is not a part of the JSON spec. So, you (or your client API) needs to do something with Date objects. By default, the node.js and .NET clients will convert Date objects to ISO-8601 formatted strings so using strings is actually a bit easier than Epoch. Just send the Date object to the database. The one trick to keep in mind here is that it's not converted back into a Date object when you read it. It comes back as a string. You have to do the conversion yourself. In JavaScript, this is easy. Just call new Date(yourDateString). Not sure about .NET or the other platforms.

Sqlite dd/mm/yyyy format. How to avoid conversion?

The program I am currently designing use the dd/mm/yyyy date format, while Sqlite standard format is yyyy-mm-dd. My program make use of quite a lot of date calculations using julianday('yyyy-mm-dd'). I know I could convert the dd/mm/yyyy format to yyyy-mm-dd by using SUBSTR(X,Y) manipulation or by using the code of the language I am designing the db front-end; but i wish to avoid those. Any Idea?
You should always store dates (and timestamps) using native date format that is provided by database engine for following reasons:
Native formats permit native date arithmetic functions to work.
Native formats permit indexes to be consistently applicable, so you can use date comparisons efficiently and use operators like BETWEEN.
Native formats take less space to store on disk. For SQLite, storing date as real number of days from 4174 BC or as integer number of seconds since Jan 1st, 1970 takes 8 bytes. For your representation, it will take at least 10 bytes.
While SQLite does not really have true native date/datetime type (which is big omission in my opinion), it does have 3 permissible formats: TEXT, REAL or INTEGER that are still treated (to some extent) as native datetime formats, and all advantages outlined above still apply.
When you need to display dates in your application, you should use libraries provided by your scripting or other programming languages that know how to display dates in desired format.
In other words, use database to store, compare and retrieve data, and use your application to render it in desired format.

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