getting 2021-01-06T18:35:16.000Z string into formatDistanceToNow

[Shawful]

Hello,

I have been trying to take a string from my database of the format "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'", which appears to be ISO8601 format, and I've found that I can parse it using the parseJSON function as a wrapper to get the date string into a Date object from the string. However, I can't use the parseISO function or I experience an invalid format error.

My ultimate goal is to get the string into a Date format and then processed by the formatDistanceToNow function. And I'm able to output formatDistanceToNow(new Date()), which I ran as a sanity check, but I can't get formatDistanceToNow(new Date(parseJSON(date))) or formatDistanceToNow(parseJSON(date)) to work without another invalid format error.

I have also tried formatDistanceToNow(new Date(year, month, date, hours, minutes, seconds)), which works when I feed raw numbers as parameters, but my application gives me an invalid format error when I attempt to pass variables as parameters to the formatDistanceToNow function.

Is there a recommended way to take a string of the format above, and manipulate it to easily show the time elapsed? I've imported the ESM node module within a NextJS application, but am struggling with manipulating the date.

Also, I looked for a similar post, but was unsuccessful in finding a similar post, but thanks in advance!

[fturmel]

Your example string input works fine with either parseJSON, parseISO or the Date constructor. Maybe it's not always consistently in this format, or it's sometimes empty?

import { parseISO, parseJSON, formatDistanceToNow } from "date-fns";

const input = "2021-01-06T18:35:16.000Z";

// const parsedDate = parseJSON(input);
// const parsedDate = parseISO(input);
const parsedDate = new Date(input);

const res = formatDistanceToNow(parsedDate);
console.log(res); // over 1 year