@chriscdn/to-date NPM

@chriscdn/to-date

A utility for converting numbers and strings into Date objects.

Motivation

This package offers several improvements over directly calling new Date(value), including:

Returning null instead of an Invalid Date object when the input is not a valid date.
Automatically detecting whether a number input is in seconds, milliseconds, or microseconds and converting accordingly.
Providing an isDate function to check if a value is a valid Date object.

Installation

Using npm:

npm install @chriscdn/to-date

Using yarn:

yarn add @chriscdn/to-date

Usage

toDate

The toDate function accepts a number, string, Date, null, or undefined and returns either a Date or null.

For numeric inputs, it determines whether the value represents seconds, milliseconds, or microseconds and converts accordingly.

Date strings without a specified time zone are interpreted using the device's time zone.

Examples:

import { toDate } from "@chriscdn/to-date";

// Interprets in the device's time zone (e.g., CET)
toDate("2024-04-04T00:00:00");
// 2024-04-03T22:00:00.000Z

toDate(1712226790000000);
// 2024-04-04T10:33:10.000Z

To resolve ambiguity about whether a numeric input represents seconds, milliseconds, or microseconds, use the EpochUnit enum. For dates after 1971, this distinction should not be an issue.

import { toDate, EpochUnit } from "@chriscdn/to-date";

toDate(1712226790000000, EpochUnit.MICROSECONDS);
// 2024-04-04T10:33:10.000Z

toDateUTC

The toDateUTC function has the same interface as toDate, but parses string dates in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This is especially useful when a string representation lacks time zone information (for example, 2025-02-27T15:00:00). Without UTC conversion, such strings are parsed according to the time zone on the server, which can lead to inconsistent results across different environments.

To perform the conversion, the function first calls toDate on the input, extracts the year, month, day, hours, minutes, and seconds, and then creates a new Date object in UTC with those values.

Example:

import { toDateUTC } from "@chriscdn/to-date";

toDateUTC("2024-04-04T00:00:00");
// 2024-04-04T00:00:00.000Z

toDateInTimeZone

Similar to toDateUTC, this function accepts a time zone parameter, allowing the date to be parsed in that time zone and returning the result in UTC format.

Example:

import { toDateInTimeZone } from "@chriscdn/to-date";

toDateInTimeZone("2025-06-27T14:00:00", "America/Toronto");
// 2025-06-27T18:00:00.000Z

isDate

The isDate function checks whether a given value is a valid Date object and returns true if it is.

Examples:

import { isDate } from "@chriscdn/to-date";

isDate("2024-04-04T00:00:00");
// false

isDate(new Date("hello"));
// false

isDate(new Date());
// true