naive-date

Use a NaiveDate as opposed to Date when you want a Date like object, but one that's not a timestamp (read Javascript's Date is just a timestamp for more details). For example,

1. You want a YMD date and a time, but these are not linked to any time zone
2. You want to perform timezone conversions i.e. given a timestamp, what is the local time in Asia/Kolkata v/s America/New_York?
3. You want to perform calendrical calculations without worrying about the impact of DST transitions (e.g. would adding 86400 seconds always add one whole day?)

NaiveDate's API is very similar to that of Date and includes all of its warts, like month indexes starting from 0. Use NaiveDate when you want to work with a Date like object and don't want to bring in a full fledged date/time handling library in your code.

The term naive is inspired by its usage in the Python datetime module, which categorizes date and time objects as "aware" or "naive" depending on whether they include time zone information or not.

Usage

Installation

Install using npm:

npm install naive-date

Or include it directly in your HTML page

<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/dist/naive-date.js"></script>

Creation

To create a NaiveDate, you can use the constructor.

import NaiveDate from 'naive-date'

// date only
// since we use 0 based indexes, the month below is Feb, not Jan
const x = new NaiveDate(2022, 1, 1)

// date and time
const y = new NaiveDate(2022, 1, 1, 10, 0, 0)

Since a NaiveDate is not linked to any time zone (and it's not a timestamp), when you print it you won't see any zone info:

x.toString()
// => '2022-02-01T00:00:00.000'

y.toString()
// => '2022-02-01T10:00:00.000'

Getters and Setters

Just like Date, NaiveDate exposes the following getters and setters:

import NaiveDate from 'naive-date'

const x = new NaiveDate(2022, 1, 1, 10, 0, 0)

x.getFullYear()     // 2022
x.getMonth()        // 1
x.getDate()         // 1
x.getHours()        // 10
x.getMinutes()      // 0
x.getSeconds()      // 0
x.getMilliseconds() // 0
x.getDay()          // 2

x.setFullYear()
x.setMonth()
x.setDate()
x.setHours()
x.setMinutes()
x.setSeconds()
x.setMilliseconds()

There's no equivalent for getUTC... and setUTC... methods since they don't make sense (NaiveDate is not a timestamp).

There's no equivalent for getTimezoneOffset() either, since a NaiveDate, by definition, is not linked to any time zone.

Timezone converstions

Given a timestamp (i.e. a Date), use the static method from() to get the local time in a given time zone.

import NaiveDate from 'naive-date'

const x = new Date(Date.UTC(2022, 1, 1, 10, 0, 0))
// => 2022-02-01T10:00:00.000Z

const y = NaiveDate.from(x, 'Asia/Kolkata')
y.toString()
// => '2022-02-01T15:30:00.000'

const z = NaiveDate.from(x, 'America/New_York')
z.toString()
// => '2022-02-01T05:00:00.000'

And to do the opposite i.e. to get a timestamp given a NaiveDate and a timezone, use the instance method .toDate(). This method returns a Date.

import NaiveDate from 'naive-date'

const x = new NaiveDate(2022, 1, 1, 10, 0, 0)
x.toString()
// => '2022-02-01T10:00:00.000'

x.toDate('Asia/Kolkata')
// => 2022-02-01T04:30:00.000Z

x.toDate('America/New_York')
// => 2022-02-01T15:00:00.000Z

Tests

To run tests on the command line using node.js, run npm test.

To run them in the browser, open mocha.html.