Javascript Date Now (UTC) in yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm:ss format

Question

My brain must be utterly fried, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the current date and time in UTC formatted as a string. No matter what I do, I just get local.

I have the following function which returns the date in the correct format, but it's always local.

 let datenow = new Date; console.log(datenow); // "2021-07-28T18:11:11.282Z" console.log(generateDatabaseDateTime(datenow)); // "2021-07-28 14:11:33" function generateDatabaseDateTime(date) { const p = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en', { year:'numeric', month:'2-digit', day:'2-digit', hour:'2-digit', minute:'2-digit', second:'2-digit', hour12: false }).formatToParts(date).reduce((acc, part) => { acc[part.type] = part.value; return acc; }, {}); return `${p.year}-${p.month}-${p.day} ${p.hour}:${p.minute}:${p.second}`; }

Does anyone know what I'm missing?

Answer 1

A simple way can be getting each UTC unit from the new Date() object and creating the desired string.

 const date = new Date(); const year = date.getUTCFullYear(); const month = String(date.getUTCMonth() + 1).padStart(2, '0'); // Month is 0-based const day = String(date.getUTCDate()).padStart(2, '0'); const hour = String(date.getUTCHours()).padStart(2, '0'); const minute = String(date.getUTCMinutes()).padStart(2, '0'); const second = String(date.getUTCSeconds()).padStart(2, '0'); const strDate = year + "-" + month + "-" + day + " " + hour + ":" + minute + ":" + second; console.log(strDate);

Adding a valuable suggestion by RobG, as sometimes comments get deleted:

Somewhat simpler: new Date().toLocaleString('en-CA',{timeZone:'UTC', hour12:false}).replace(',','') .

Answer 2

We should use in-built toISOString function to covert it to ISO date format and remove not required data using string manipulation.

 let datenow = new Date(); console.log(datenow); // "2021-07-28T18:11:11.282Z" console.log(generateDatabaseDateTime(datenow)); // "2021-07-28 14:11:33" function generateDatabaseDateTime(date) { return date.toISOString().replace("T"," ").substring(0, 19); }

Ideally solution should be to use momentjs or dayjs library.

Answer 3

Adding this answer as well that RobG suggested.

 let datenow = new Date; console.log(datenow); // "2021-07-28T18:11:11.282Z" console.log(generateDatabaseDateTime(datenow)); // "2021-07-28 14:11:33" function generateDatabaseDateTime(date) { const p = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en', { year:'numeric', month:'2-digit', day:'2-digit', hour:'2-digit', minute:'2-digit', second:'2-digit', hour12: false, timeZone:'UTC' }).formatToParts(date).reduce((acc, part) => { acc[part.type] = part.value; return acc; }, {}); return `${p.year}-${p.month}-${p.day} ${p.hour}:${p.minute}:${p.second}`; }