Localising DD MMM YYYY - How to test locally - date

Question

I have a date in a format:
var date = "21 Sep 2017 14:00"
I want to change this date into en-US (in other words local) without the timezone. Which i guess should be:
"Sep 21 2017";
When i do this (I thought i would need to tell moment what the format of my date was):
moment.utc(date).local().format('DD MMM YYYY') it outputs "21 Sep 2017"
but if i do:
moment.utc(date).local().format() it still outputs "21 Sep 2017"
To test, I have been changing my regional settings from en-GB to en-US and it seems to make no difference.
What am i doing wrong here?
How do i convert the date to the local setting (and test it locally too)
I'm in en-GB
EDIT:
Re comments - Why then does this not say Set rather than Sep:
http://jsfiddle.net/rLjQx/5744/

Answer 1

As docs states:
By default, Moment.js comes with English (United States) locale strings. If you need other locales, you can load them into Moment.js for later use.
So first of all be sure that you are loading all required locales (see Loading locales in the browser or Loading locales in NodeJS).
Then you have to use locale() method to change locale of a moment object, local() is a different function. Note that moment usually uses 2 digit local code, so if you want to set locale to italian you have to use 'it' instead of "it-IT". You can find a full list of supported locales here.
Finally, since your input is not in a format recognized by moment(String) (ISO 8601 or RFC 2822), you have to use moment(String, String), as Matt Johnson highlighted in the comments.
Here a live example:
// var date = "21 Sep 2017 14:00";
// moment.utc(date, 'DD MMM YYYY HH:mm').local().format('DD MMM YYYY');
var m = moment("21 Sep 2017", 'DD MMM YYYY');
var formatted = m.locale("it").format("DD MMM YYYY");
$("#TestIT").text(formatted);
formatted = m.locale("en").format("DD MMM YYYY");
$("#TestEN").text(formatted);
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/moment.js/2.20.1/moment-with-locales.min.js"></script>
<div id="TestIT"></div>
<div id="TestEN"></div>