Borislav Hadzhiev
Sun Jan 23 2022·3 min read
Photo by Farsai Chaikulngamdee
Use the toLocaleString()
method to get the current date and time in London,
e.g. date.toLocaleString('en-GB', {timeZone: 'Europe/London'})
. The
toLocaleString
method returns a string that represents the date according to
the provided time zone.
const date = new Date(); // 👇️ 23/01/2022, 10:33:23 console.log( date.toLocaleString('en-GB', { timeZone: 'Europe/London', }), );
The toLocaleString method returns a locale-specific string that is adjusted to the provided time zone.
The two parameters we passed to the toLocaleString
method are:
locales
- a string with a BCP 47 language tag or an array of such strings.
You can use any of the available locales, e.g. en-US
for US, es-MX
for
Mexico or en-CA
for Canada. If you need more information about this
parameter, check out the
MDN docs.options
object where we specified the timeZone
property. Read more about
the options
object in the
MDN docs.You can find a table of the country codes and time zone database names by visiting this wikipedia page.
Date
object in JavaScript does not store a time zone, it stores a timestamp that represents the number of milliseconds that have passed since midnight on January 1st, 1970.The date and time of the Date
object correspond to the time zone, however the
Date
object has no way of storing the specific time zone.
toLocaleString
method to get a string that represents the time zone and use the options
object parameter to format the string to your needs.You can use the different properties on the options
object of the
toLocaleString
method to format the date and time for the specific time zone
in different ways.
const date = new Date(); // 👇️ Sunday, 23 January 2022 at 10:36:30 Greenwich Mean Time console.log( date.toLocaleString('en-GB', { timeZone: 'Europe/London', dateStyle: 'full', timeStyle: 'full', }), );
We set the dateStyle
and timeStyle
properties in the options
object to
full
to get a more verbose representation of the date and time.
Other possible values for the two properties are: long
, medium
and short
.
const date = new Date(); // 👇️ 23/01/2022, 10:38 console.log( date.toLocaleString('en-GB', { timeZone: 'Europe/London', dateStyle: 'short', timeStyle: 'short', }), );
You can view all of the properties and values the options
object implements by
visiting the
MDN docs.
Here is an example that shows the month, day, hours, minutes and seconds as
2-digits, even if their values are less than 10
.
const date = new Date(); // 👇️ 23/01/2022, 10:38:55 GMT console.log( date.toLocaleString('en-GB', { timeZone: 'Europe/London', year: 'numeric', month: '2-digit', day: '2-digit', hour: '2-digit', minute: '2-digit', second: '2-digit', timeZoneName: 'short', }), );
By setting the values of the date and time components to 2
digits, we format
them consistently, even if they have a value of less than 10
.
If that's the case, the values get padded with a leading zero.
timeZoneName
property to a value of short
, to show an abbreviation of the time zone name (GMT) at the end of the result.You can view all the other properties the options
object supports by visiting
the
MDN docs.