There were issues with time zones with YYYY-MM-DD dates being parsed into UTC time as opposed to local time. Which creates bugs for developers who aren’t aware of this problem. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29174810/javascript-date-timezone-issue
Also there are difference in support for parts of Dates in different browsers. (See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11253351/javascript-date-object-issue-in-safari-and-ie)
It is also hard to add and subtract timestamps with built in Date functions. There is no way to do this without writing a lot of code and doing a lot of checks. Also, there is no way to compare 2 times.
Formatting dates is also not available without writing your own code for using third party libraries.
Moment.js solves all of these issues by providing built in functions to do all these common operations. It provides functions for parsing and formatting dates.
The momentconstructor is where you can pass in a date string, and a moment object will be created. For example, you can pass in:
moment('2019-08-04')
and you will get back a moment which you can compare with other moment objects, and add or subtract by different time spans.
If you do not passing in anything to the moment constructor, you get the current date and time.
It also takes a second argument. If you want to make sure a date is parsed as a YYYY-MM-DD date, then write moment(‘2019–08–04’, 'YYYY-MM-DD') . If you don’t know the format of your date or time, then you can pass in an array of possible formats and Moment will pick the right one:
moment('2019–08–04', ['YYYY-MM-DD', 'DD-MM-YYYY']);
After you create a Moment object, then you can do many things like formatting dates:
const a = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD').format('MMMM Do YYYY, h:mm:ss a');
console.log(a);
// August 4th 2019, 12:00:00 am
const b = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD').format('dddd');
console.log(b);
// Sunday
const c = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD').format("MMM Do YY");
console.log(c);
// Aug 4th 19
const d = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD').format('YYYY [escaped] YYYY');
console.log(d);
// 2019 escaped 2019
const e = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD').format();
console.log(e);
// 2019-08-04T00:00:00-07:00
From the above examples, we see that we can format dates in pretty much any way we want.
We can also tell what time span a date is relative to another date by writing:
const augDate = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD');
const sepDate = moment('2019–09–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD');
console.log(augDate.from(sepDate)); // a month ago
We can also add or subtract Moment dates:
const augDate = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD');
const sepDate = moment('2019–09–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD');
console.log(augDate.add(10, 'days').calendar()); // 08/14/2019
console.log(augDate.subtract(10, 'days').calendar()); // 07/25/2019
It is easy to compare 2 dates
moment('2010-01-01').isSame('2010-01-01', 'month'); // true
moment('2010-01-01').isSame('2010-05-01', 'day'); // false, different month
moment('2008-01-01').isSame('2011-01-01', 'month'); // false, different year
You can also check if a date is has Daylight Saving Time in effect or not:
const augDate = moment('2019–08–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD');
const decDate = moment('2019–12–04', 'YYYY-MM-DD');
console.log(augDate.isDST()) // true
console.log(decDate.isDST()) // false
And you can convert back to JavaScript date any time by calling the toDate() function on a Moment object.
