Question

What is the best approach to add or subtract timezone differences to the targetTime variable below. The GMT timezone values comes from the DB in this format: 1.00 for London time, -8.00 for Pacific time and so on.

Code looks like this:

date = "September 21, 2011 00:00:00";
targetTime = new Date(date);

Answer 1

You can use Date.getTimezoneOffset which returns the local offset from GMT in minutes. Note that it returns the value with the opposite sign you might expect. So GMT-5 is 300 and GMT+1 is -60.

var date = "September 21, 2011 00:00:00";
var targetTime = new Date(date);
var timeZoneFromDB = -7.00; //time zone value from database
//get the timezone offset from local time in minutes
var tzDifference = timeZoneFromDB * 60 + targetTime.getTimezoneOffset();
//convert the offset to milliseconds, add to targetTime, and make a new Date
var offsetTime = new Date(targetTime.getTime() + tzDifference * 60 * 1000);