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.

format(parseISO('2022-04-19T08:59:10.177Z'), 'eeee do MMM, yyyy')

I don't believe that date-fns can handle natural language date parsing. You would have to pre-determine the expected patterns ahead of time and find a match by trying them all in the parse function.

Fortunately, the scope of your problem makes it somewhat easy to solve with regular expressions. For fun, I've hacked at it a bit while drinking my morning coffee. I hope this sets you on the right path. If others find this useful, maybe this can be the foundation of a new date-fns function. https://codesandbox.io/s/natural-language-date-parsing-demo-6uzkk?file=/src/index.js

If you want something more robust, Chrono looks pretty cool. There's no Hebrew locale, but maybe that's something you could contribute back. https://github.com/wanasit/chrono

@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})/.

As you can see, with moment lib, we need 2 steps to get the result: parse string to Date object, then format date object to string.

Your code - format(new Date("10-13-20"), 'MM-DD-YY') is format step, try convert a date object to a string with format template is MM-DD-YY. But your date object is not correct.

The solution is to do the same as with moment lib:

1. Parse date string to date object. Use parse

   const dateString = '10-13-20';
   const date = parse(dateString, 'MM-dd-yy', new Date()) // not MM-DD-YY
   

2. Format date object to result string. Use format

   const result = format(date, "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSxxx")
   console.log(result)
   

   Result will be like (the same with moment's result in my timezone):

    2020-10-13T00:00:00.000+09:00