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Tip of the Day: Calculating durations with Moment

27 Feb 2016 ~ 1 min read


Moment, the javascript library, has quite a nice fluent interface for some operations, others just need a little more thought.

For example, I wanted the duration of something and I had recorded the start and end time. I thought something like this, finding the difference between two dates and converting it to a duration, would work:

var duration = endTime.diff(startTime).duration().asSeconds();

However, that doesn’t work.

What you have to do is find the difference, then pass that into the duration function, like this:

var duration = moment.duration(endTime.diff(startTime)).asSeconds();

And now I get what I wanted.


Headshot of Colin Mackay

Hi, I'm Colin. I'm a software engineer with over 30 years of experience based in central Scotland, specialising in Microsoft technologies, initially with C++ and then in C#. I was a Microsoft MVP from 2007 to 2010 and a Code Project MVP from 2005 to 2009.