It seems that you are using Version 2.0 of date-fns, which is still in alpha (development) status currently.

What functions are available and how they work still seems to change frequently. For example, while in version v2.0.0-alpha.26 toDate() can handle string parameters, it cannot do that any longer in version v2.0.0-alpha.27. There is a new parseISO() function instead.

This should work now:

format(parseISO('2019-02-11T14:00:00'), 'MM/dd/yyyy')

However, while version 2 is still in beta, I would suggest using the stable version 1.x for now.

@nfantone the things are much more straightforward than discussed in the thread. Sorry for the confusion.

Simply use new Date() or Date.parse() to parse free-form strings. This is how old parse worked and unless you know why you need parse/parseISO/parseJSON/etc, you should not use any of that.

new Date('2020/05/05')
//=> Tue May 05 2020 00:00:00 GMT+0800 (Singapore Standard Time)

Date.parse('2020/05/05')
//=> 1588608000000

As @Qvatra noted, this is not consistent across browsers (but will work for you example) and v1 didn't fix that, and this is why we removed it in the first place. It's impossible to write a universal string parser and this inconsistency is the evidence of that.

If you have to parse something like 1986-03-05 10:12:05 (I highly recommend using ISO 8601 or any other standard to store dates as strings), you can do it with help of parse or even better simple custom regexp like /(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}) (\d{2}):(\d{2}):(\d{2})/.