Any way to parse a time string using Moment.js but ignore timezone info?

Question

Given the volume of Timezone questions, I would have thought to be able to find the answer to this issue, but haven't had any success.

Is there a way using moment.js to parse an ISO-8601 string but have it parsed in my local timzeone? Essentially I want to ignore the timezone information that is supplied in the ISO string.

For example, if I am in EDT timezone:

var x = moment( "2012-12-31T00:00:00+0000" );

will give me: "2012-12-30T19:00:00-5000"

I'm looking to ignore the timezone info and just have it give me a moment equivalent of "2012-12-31T00:00:00-5000" local time (EDT).

Answer 1

I don't think you really want to ignore the offset. That would ultimately just be replacing the offset you provided with one from your local time zone - and that would result in a completely different moment in time.

Perhaps you are just looking for a way to have a moment retain the time zone it was given? If so, then use the moment.parseZone function. For example:

var m = moment.parseZone("2012-12-31T00:00:00+0000");
var s = m.format();   // "2012-12-31T00:00:00+00:00"

You could also achieve this with moment.utc. The difference is that moment.parseZone will retain whatever offset you give it, while moment.utc will adjust to UTC if you give it a non-zero offset.

Answer 2

I solved this by supplying a format as the second argument, and using Moment's method of escaping characters, and wrapped square brackets around the timezone.

moment("2016-01-01T05:00:00-05:00", "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss[Z]").startOf("hour").format()

This will still create moment objects using your local time zone, but it won't do any sort of auto-timezone calculation. So the above example will give you 5am regardless of timezone supplied.