Get the POSIX time at the moment when this task is run.

Get the current time periodically. How often though? Well, you provide an interval in milliseconds (like 1000 for a second or 60 * 1000 for a minute or 60 * 60 * 1000 for an hour) and that is how often you get a new time!

Check out this example to see how to use it in an application.

This function is not for animation. Use the onAnimationFrame function for that sort of thing! It syncs up with repaints and will end up being much smoother for any moving visuals.

Turn a Posix time into the number of milliseconds since 1970 January 1 at 00:00:00 UTC. It was a Thursday.

Turn milliseconds into a Posix time.

The time zone for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

The utc zone has no time adjustments. It never observes daylight-saving time and it never shifts around based on political restructuring.

Produce a Zone based on the current UTC offset. You can use this to figure out what day it is where you are:

import Task exposing (Task)
import Time

whatDayIsIt : Task x Int
whatDayIsIt =
  Task.map2 Time.toDay Time.here Time.now

Accuracy Note: This function can only give time zones like Etc/GMT+9 or Etc/GMT-6. It cannot give you Europe/Stockholm, Asia/Tokyo, or any other normal time zone from the full list due to limitations in JavaScript. For example, if you run here in New York City, the resulting Zone will never be America/New_York. Instead you get Etc/GMT-5 or Etc/GMT-4 depending on Daylight Saving Time. So even though browsers must have internal access to America/New_York to figure out that offset, there is no public API to get the full information. This means the Zone you get from this function will act weird if (1) an application stays open across a Daylight Saving Time boundary or (2) you try to use it on historical data.

Future Note: We can improve here when there is good browser support for JavaScript functions that (1) expose the IANA time zone database and (2) let you ask the time zone of the computer. The committee that reviews additions to JavaScript is called TC39, and I encourage you to push for these capabilities! I cannot do it myself unfortunately.

Alternatives: See the customZone docs to learn how to implement stopgaps.

What year is it?!

import Time exposing (toYear, utc, millisToPosix)

toYear utc (millisToPosix 0) == 1970
toYear nyc (millisToPosix 0) == 1969

-- pretend `nyc` is the `Zone` for America/New_York.

What month is it?!

import Time exposing (toMonth, utc, millisToPosix)

toMonth utc (millisToPosix 0) == Jan
toMonth nyc (millisToPosix 0) == Dec

-- pretend `nyc` is the `Zone` for America/New_York.

What day is it?! (Days go from 1 to 31)

import Time exposing (toDay, utc, millisToPosix)

toDay utc (millisToPosix 0) == 1
toDay nyc (millisToPosix 0) == 31

-- pretend `nyc` is the `Zone` for America/New_York.

What day of the week is it?

import Time exposing (toWeekday, utc, millisToPosix)

toWeekday utc (millisToPosix 0) == Thu
toWeekday nyc (millisToPosix 0) == Wed

-- pretend `nyc` is the `Zone` for America/New_York.

What hour is it? (From 0 to 23)

import Time exposing (toHour, utc, millisToPosix)

toHour utc (millisToPosix 0) == 0  -- 12am
toHour nyc (millisToPosix 0) == 19 -- 7pm

-- pretend `nyc` is the `Zone` for America/New_York.

What minute is it? (From 0 to 59)

import Time exposing (toMinute, utc, millisToPosix)

toMinute utc (millisToPosix 0) == 0

This can be different in different time zones. Some time zones are offset by 30 or 45 minutes!

What second is it?

import Time exposing (toSecond, utc, millisToPosix)

toSecond utc (millisToPosix    0) == 0
toSecond utc (millisToPosix 1234) == 1
toSecond utc (millisToPosix 5678) == 5

import Time exposing (toMillis, utc, millisToPosix)

toMillis utc (millisToPosix    0) == 0
toMillis utc (millisToPosix 1234) == 234
toMillis utc (millisToPosix 5678) == 678

Intended for package authors.

The documentation of here explains that it has certain accuracy limitations that block on adding new APIs to JavaScript. The customZone function is a stopgap that takes:

1. A default offset in minutes. So Etc/GMT-5 is customZone (-5 * 60) [] and Etc/GMT+9 is customZone (9 * 60) [].
2. A list of exceptions containing their start time in "minutes since the Unix epoch" and their offset in "minutes from UTC"

Human times will be based on the nearest start, falling back on the default offset if the time is older than all of the exceptions.

When paired with getZoneName, this allows you to load the real IANA time zone database however you want: HTTP, cache, hardcode, etc.

Note: If you use this, please share your work in an Gren community forum! I am sure others would like to hear about it, and more experience reports will help me and the any potential TC39 proposal.

Intended for package authors.

Use Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone to try to get names like Europe/Moscow or America/Havana. From there you can look it up in any IANA data you loaded yourself.