React Native + Javascript Date Time manipulation: moment and date-fns libraries

 There are multiple method to format and manipulate Date and Time. Generally speaking the most common libraries used to manipulate dates are Day.js, Luxon, Moment, and Date-fns.

Moment developers have discouraged developers to use moments at this time due to not being built for modern JavaScript era.

Day.js

Installation:

npm install dayjs --save

Header import:

import calendar from 'dayjs/plugin/calendar'

import dayjs from "dayjs";

Usage example:

dayjs.extend(calendar) dayjs().calendar(dayjs('2008-01-01')) dayjs().calendar(null, { sameDay: '[Today at] h:mm A', // The same day ( Today at 2:30 AM ) nextDay: '[Tomorrow at] h:mm A', // The next day ( Tomorrow at 2:30 AM ) nextWeek: 'dddd [at] h:mm A', // The next week ( Sunday at 2:30 AM ) lastDay: '[Yesterday at] h:mm A', // The day before ( Yesterday at 2:30 AM ) lastWeek: '[Last] dddd [at] h:mm A', // Last week ( Last Monday at 2:30 AM ) sameElse: 'DD/MM/YYYY' // Everything else ( 17/10/2011 ) })

Additional links: https://day.js.org/docs/en/plugin/calendar

Formats

https://day.js.org/docs/en/display/format

Luxon usage

npm install --save luxon

Luxon has great date time support. However, relative calendar outputs will change to in x days format - which I don't like.

 DateTime.fromJSDate(date).toRelativeCalendar();

Moment usage

import moment from "moment";

And to use the moment library, use the method below (note the bolded text). In the example below, I use calendar function to get the relative date to output on my application.

let formattedDate = moment(date).calendar(null, {

            sameDay: '[Today]',

            nextDay: '[Tomorrow]',

            nextWeek: 'dddd',

            lastDay: '[Yesterday]',

            lastWeek: '[Last] dddd',

            sameElse: ' '

        });

Further examples: https://betterprogramming.pub/using-moment-js-in-react-native-d1b6ebe226d4

Date-fns

This date-fns library is a lot lighter to use since you can import a specific function instead of the entire large library. However, it doesn't have certain customized option to allow manipulation of the relative date output similar to above.

Import the function to use similar to below:

import { format, formatRelative } from "date-fns";

To use in the code, you call the simple format date function similar to below:

format(date, "MMM d, yyyy");