How do I create a date in a specific timezone?

[chalupagrande]

I have a date like: 2025-01-08T18:00

How do I tell date-fns that this is in America/Chicago timezone?

[jawnothin]

I came here to get the answer to that specific question... because right now it just assumes the timezone on the local device, which may or may not be correct.

[cbejensen]

Seems like TZDate reads ISO-like strings as UTC or local, while passing in the elements as individual args achieves the desired result:

console.log(new TZDate(2025, 0, 8, 18, 'America/Chicago').toString());
// Wed Jan 08 2025 18:00:00 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

[simoneb]

I've been looking into the same issue, which is somewhat unexpected because it suggests that the TZDate constructor applies different logic based on whether a date string is passed, or the individual bits (year, month, day, ...).

In the string case, it is "assumed" to be in a certain timezone, then convered into the desired timezone.
In the other case, it is interpreted as being that specific point in time in the desired timezone.

Is there any way to achieve the second behavior using the string format as an input?

[zilet]

Not sure why there is a different behavior between string and numerical values. I expect that TZDate will create a Date in the passed timezone from string that does not contain zone (and not append system timezone and convert it).

date-fns-tz does this as expected.

e.g.

fromZonedTime(timeframeDurationsIso("2025-01-31T16:00" "America/New_York);