JavaScripts treats dates received from service as UTC Format

Question

I have to display dates received from the service in UI using javascript.

 var now = new Date ('2015-09-26T09:52:19');
 alert(now) // it alerts Sat Sep 26 2015 02:52:19 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

I am in PST timeZone, I am wondering why Javascript treats date received as UTC.

One more observation is if i remove "T" from date. Javascript doesn't treat it as UTC date.

Its coming from Service in that format.. All the dates has T — manthan davda, Oct 08 '15 at 13:46
the client has no idea what timezone it is - you should treat all date times as UTC to make things simpler. — Daniel A. White, Oct 08 '15 at 13:47
Check this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18643351/change-timezone-for-date-variable — Danieboy, Oct 08 '15 at 13:49
My confusion is why it treats date as UTC is T is present in string. — manthan davda, Oct 08 '15 at 13:52
@DanielA.White the client does in deed 'know' (although it may not be correct) `new Date().getTimezoneOffset()` which for some weird reason returns it in *minutes*. — Jared Smith, Oct 08 '15 at 13:54

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 08 '15 at 13:58

"Javascript does not have native support for timezones. When you create a date in Javascript from an ISO string that is in the site's timezone, the Date object will automatically be converted into the browser's local timezone (which may be different than the site's timezone). Strings with no timezone specified are also created in the browser's local timezone." - Jason Yuen, Aug 25 2013, Dealing with Timezones in Javascript Nulogy.com

Have a look into momentjs (www.momentjs.com) if you wish to convert easily between timezones.

This is taken directly from their website.

var newYork    = moment.tz("2014-06-01 12:00", "America/New_York");  
var losAngeles = newYork.clone().tz("America/Los_Angeles");  
var london     = newYork.clone().tz("Europe/London");  

newYork.format();    // 2014-06-01T12:00:00-04:00  
losAngeles.format(); // 2014-06-01T09:00:00-07:00  
london.format();     // 2014-06-01T17:00:00+01:00

One more observation - Only for chrome its getting converted to local time zone for other browsers date is treated as local time zone date.. — manthan davda, Oct 08 '15 at 15:08

JavaScripts treats dates received from service as UTC Format

1 Answers1