new Date() in wrong time zone

Question

At the time of this post my current time is 2017-01-10T19:23:00.000Z but new Date() gives me 2017-01-11T00:23:19.521Z 5 hours ahead of my current timezone. This affects the way my data is stored in my MongoDB. I know I can set the time to 5 hours ago using

var datetime    = new Date();
 datetime.setHours(datetime.getHours()-5); 

But I will prefer a better way to do this. I tried using this. I still got the same time. In other parts of my code I get Tue Jan 10 2017 19:54:30 GMT-0500 (EST) different from the initial time. I will be happy if someone can point out what's wrong here.

Frequent

Maybe try .toLocaleString() or something like new Date(Date.UTC(year, month, day, hour, minute, second)) – Wily

@Wily Thanks for your response. I used new Date().toLocaleString(); and I got 1/10/2017, 8:20:30 PM not exactly what I'm looking for. I will like the time in TZ format. However new Date(Date.UTC(year, month, day, hour, minute, second)) gave an error of year is not defined – Frequent

Um, the time of your post is 2017-01-11 00:56:01Z. No idea where you lost one and a half hours? – Permission

Obviously I spent the time trying to make sure the post was well explanatory while searching through suggested answers to my question. Do you have a solution or you're trying to be funny? – Frequent

It seems your times are correct, you just don't realize it's in UTC (that's what the Z means). The one is formatted using .toUTCString() (or .toISOString()), the other is formatted using .toString() which does output your local timezone. They might be represented by the same Date object; and no, this does not affect how they are stored in MongoDB. – Permission

@Permission so this is purely a format issue ? I initially tried to query my database using local time and it returned nothing since my collection was using UTC. My MongoDB collection is like this { "_id" : ObjectId("58758246b67c161ac8479489"), "datetime" : ISODate("2017-01-11T00:54:30.241Z"), "temperature" : 19, "humidity" : 23 } – Frequent

Yes, timezones are entirely a formatting issue. In JavaScript, every Date object is just a number (milliseconds since epoch). You need to parse and format appropriately for the timezone you want. – Permission

I agree. As per my MongoDB storing in UTC. How can I query that? This gave me a tough time today. I couldn't find any data for the period I was searching for. – Frequent

Answer 1

Using moment.js is the easiest way to accomplish what you are asking.

moment().format() // "2017-01-11T13:56:15-05:00"

The output is a string in ISO-8601 format, with time zone offset in effect in your local time zone.

You could do this yourself with a lot of code that reads the various properties of the Date object, building a string from those values. But it is not built-in to the Date object in this way.

Also, note any time you try to adjust a Date object by a time zone offset, you are simply picking a different point in time. You're not actually changing the behavior of the time zone being used by the Date object.

Mediant

Thanks Matt. I think I will use moment.js. – Frequent

moment is the way to go. – Pudendas

sadly this does not help if i need to create a date inputting day,month,year,hour, minute – Milden

Answer 2

If you don't want to use any exteral JS file, You can simply use following code to get current timezone.

new Date().toString();

Rodgers