How to get only timeZoneName in Date Object in any language?

Question

I am trying to extract only timeZoneName from Date object. I did it in english using regex but, how to do it in different languages like french. I realized regex is not an option for this. How do I get only timeZoneName?

let d = new Date().toString();
    let finalD = (d.substring(d.search("GMT"), d.length));
    const [gmt, time] = finalD.split('(');
    const timezone = time.replace(/\)/g, "");
    console.log(gmt, timezone);

Answer 1

In most modern JavaScript environments you can use the ECMAScript Internationalization API to achieve this. In particular DateTimeFormat exposes functions that you can use.

const d1 = new Date(2020, 0, 1);
const d2 = new Date(2020, 6, 1);

const dtf1 = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en', { timeZoneName: 'long'});
const dtf2 = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('fr', { timeZoneName: 'long'});

console.log(dtf1.formatToParts(d1).find(x => x.type ==='timeZoneName').value);
console.log(dtf1.formatToParts(d2).find(x => x.type ==='timeZoneName').value);
console.log(dtf2.formatToParts(d1).find(x => x.type ==='timeZoneName').value);
console.log(dtf2.formatToParts(d2).find(x => x.type ==='timeZoneName').value);

In the above example, I show formatters for two different languages and two different dates. This highlights that the value will be different depending on whether standard time or daylight time is in effect.

A couple of other points:

• If you omit the Date object passed to formatToParts, it will use the current date and time (same as new Date()).

• If you pass undefined instead of a language code, it will use the user's default language.

• You can also use the timeZoneName option when calling other methods on DateTimeFormat, or when calling toLocaleString and similar functions on a Date object instance. I used formatToParts to make it easy to get just the time zone name without doing any string manipulation.