#JAVASCRIPT EQUIVALENT OF PHP DATE FORMAT CODE#

Almost every year there’s a change to the rules in at least one country, meaning any code with these rules baked in must be kept up-to-date-it’s worth considering what your codebase depends on for this for each tier of your app. Countries can decide to change their time zone offsets for Daylight Savings Time for political reasons as well. This means that when it is 5 PM where I live, it is 5 PM - 05:45 = 11:15 AM UTC, which translates to 11:15 AM UTC + 01:00 = 12:15 PM in Uppsala, perfect for both of us.Īlso, be aware of the difference between time zone (Central European Time) and time zone offset (UTC+05:45). I send him a message, “Hey Anton, let’s talk at 5 PM.” I immediately get the response, “Your time or my time?”Īnton tells me that he lives in the Central European time zone which is UTC+01:00. Let’s think of a different scenario: I want to tell a friend living in Uppsala, Sweden that I want to talk to him at 5 PM. Similarly, there wouldn’t be any confusion if instead I said, for example, “let’s meet in one and a half hours.” We routinely talk about time this way with people living in the same city or time zone. Give or take a few minutes, if I ask my friend to meet me at a nearby cafe at 3:00 PM, I can expect to see her there at roughly that time.

This is what we call “local time,” the time that I see on wall clocks around me and on my wrist watch. As I scribble this article, the clock on my laptop shows July 21 1:29 PM. Standardizing the TimeĪ DateTime is a very specific point in time.

#JAVASCRIPT EQUIVALENT OF PHP DATE FORMAT FREE#

So even if you’ve never written a line of JavaScript before, feel free to continue reading as I hardly assume any prior knowledge of JavaScript in the article. Note: Even though I have used JavaScript as the programming language discussed in this article, these are general concepts that apply, to a large extent, to virtually all programming languages and their date libraries. The concepts I have outlined here will help you to avoid some of the common issues that might come up when doing these date-to-string and string-to-date transformations. If you are sending and receiving data through a REST API, you will eventually need to convert the date to a string and vice versa because JSON doesn’t have a native data structure to represent DateTime.

All date libraries work by giving you access to convenient data structures to represent a DateTime. As a programmer, you need to understand the basics and be able to appreciate the problems that date libraries solve to make the most out of them.Īlso, date/time libraries can only take you so far. The bugs that come up due to its incorrect understanding can be extremely difficult to understand and fix, even with the help of date libraries. However, we often use date libraries without thinking about how date/time actually works. You can find a reliable date library for both the front end and the back end to do most of the heavy lifting for you.

They greatly simplify date parsing, date arithmetic and logical operations, and date formatting. DateTime Libraries Help If You Understand Them Correctlyĭate libraries help in many ways to make your life easier. The potential difficulties with DateTime calculation discussed in this article are only the tip of the iceberg, but they’re still helpful to know about, with or without a library. Here we will explore some of the key concepts that are necessary for manipulating date and time values correctly, formats that are convenient for storing DateTime values and transferring them over APIs, and more.įor starters, the right answer for production code is almost always to use a proper library rather than rolling your own. In this article, I’m going to help you think clearly about date and time fields and suggest some best practices that can help you avoid date/time hell. This in-depth guide to DateTime manipulation should help you understand the programming concepts and best practices relevant to time and date without having to browse through a sea of information on this topic. There are hundreds of articles on the topic out there, however, most are either too academic, focusing on nitty-gritty details, or they are too patchy, providing short snippets of code without much explanation accompanying them. Handling date and time fields is certainly not rocket science but can often be tedious and error-prone.

Almost every app a developer builds will have some component where date/time needs to be obtained from the user, stored in a database, and displayed back to the user.Īsk any programmer about their experience handling dates and time zones and they will probably share some war stories.

#JAVASCRIPT EQUIVALENT OF PHP DATE FORMAT SOFTWARE#

As a software developer, you can’t run away from date manipulation.

Javascript equivalent of php date format