Formatting a Date String in React Native

There is no need to include a bulky library such as Moment.js to fix such a simple issue.

The issue you are facing is not with formatting, but with parsing.

As John Shammas mentions in another answer, the Date constructor (and Date.parse) are picky about the input. Your 2016-01-04 10:34:23 may work in one JavaScript implementation, but not necessarily in the other.

According to the specification of ECMAScript 5.1, Date.parse supports (a simplification of) ISO 8601. That's good news, because your date is already very ISO 8601-like.

All you have to do is change the input format just a little. Swap the space for a T: 2016-01-04T10:34:23; and optionally add a time zone (2016-01-04T10:34:23+01:00), otherwise UTC is assumed.

The beauty of the React Native is that it supports lots of JS libraries like Moment.js. Using moment.js would be a better/easier way to handle date/time instead coding from scratch

just run this in the terminal (yarn add moment also works if using React's built-in package manager):

npm install moment --save

And in your React Native js page:

import Moment from 'moment';

render(){
    Moment.locale('en');
    var dt = '2016-05-02T00:00:00';
    return(<View> {Moment(dt).format('d MMM')} </View>) //basically you can do all sorts of the formatting and others
}

You may check the moment.js official docs here https://momentjs.com/docs/

Easily accomplished using a package.

Others have mentioned Moment. Moment is great but very large for a simple use like this, and unfortunately not modular so you have to import the whole package to use any of it.

I recommend using date-fns (https://date-fns.org/) (https://github.com/date-fns/date-fns). It is light-weight and modular, so you can import only the functions that you need.

In your case:

Install it: npm install date-fns --save

In your component:

import { format } from "date-fns";

var date = new Date("2016-01-04 10:34:23");

var formattedDate = format(date, "MMMM do, yyyy H:mma");

console.log(formattedDate);

Substitute the format string above "MMMM do, yyyy H:mma" with whatever format you require.

Update: v1 vs v2 format differences

v1 used Y for year and D for day, while v2 uses y and d. Format strings above have been updated for v2; the equivalent for v1 would be "MMMM Do, YYYY H:mma" (source: https://blog.date-fns.org/post/unicode-tokens-in-date-fns-v2-sreatyki91jg/). Thanks @Red