Detect timezone abbreviation using JavaScript

Question

I need a way to detect the timezone of a given date object. I do NOT want the offset, nor do I want the full timezone name. I need to get the timezone abbreviation.

For example, GMT, UTC, PST, MST, CST, EST, etc...

Is this possible? The closest I've gotten is parsing the result of date.toString(), but even that won't give me an abbreviation. It gives me the timezone's long name.

Answer 1

A native solution:

var zone = new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-us',{timeZoneName:'short'}).split(' ')[2] console.log(zone)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date/toLocaleDateString

You can pass undefined instead of en-us to default to the browser's current locale.

Answer 2

moment-timezone includes an undocumented method .zoneAbbr() which returns the time zone abbreviation. This also requires a set of rules which are available to select and download as needed.

Doing this:

<script src="moment.js"></script> <script src="moment-timezone.js"></script> <script src="moment-timezone-data.js"></script> <script>     moment().tz("America/Los_Angeles").zoneAbbr(); </script> 

Returns:

'PDT' // As of this posting. 

Edit (Feb 2018)

Evan Czaplicki has worked on a draft proposal to add a time zone API to browsers.