Are Alexa skill dates the same in the Service Simulator and the Echo?

Question

My Alexa node.js skill involves getting the current date using "new Date()". In the Service Simulator the date returned is UTC. But I need the time in "America/New_York" -- my skill is local to New York. So I can convert the time zone, no problem. But I'm wondering whether this will get the same result when I deploy the skill. That is, does the Date() function on the actual Service convert to local time from UTC? If it does, then I will need some way of determining in my code whether I am in the Service Simulator or the actual Service, and converting to New York time in my accordingly.

Thank you.

Answer 1

From the documentation for Date

If no arguments are provided, the constructor creates a JavaScript Date object for the current date and time according to system settings.

So depending on the system settings the timezones can be different. To overcome this you can use UTC date everywhere and then simply convert the timezone where needed.

// date with some timezone depending on system
let date = new Date();

// date in UTC
let utcDate = new Date(date.getUTCFullYear(), date.getUTCMonth(), date.getUTCDate(), date.getUTCHours(), date.getUTCMinutes(), date.getUTCSeconds());

Note: utcDate will still be in the system timezone, but the actual value it holds will represent the correct date and time in UTC.