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How To Create A Timer With React

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE on July 27, 2022

For one of my current projects, I created a timer until the release on New Year's Eve - December 31, 2022. Since the project is written in React, I...

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Raí B. Toffoletto • Jul 29 '22

Nice beginner article @yuridevat and great comment @lukeshiru . I also would rather store the unix timespan than the values individually, it makes easier to do math with it and you wouldn't need even to setTime a new timespan every second, a simple subtraction would do the trick. =D

Building on that, here's a handy hook:

import { useState, useEffect } from "react";

const SECOND = 1_000;
const MINUTE = SECOND * 60;
const HOUR = MINUTE * 60;
const DAY = HOUR * 24;

export default function useTimer(deadline, interval = SECOND) {
  const [timespan, setTimespan] = useState(new Date(deadline) - Date.now());

  useEffect(() => {
    const intervalId = setInterval(() => {
      setTimespan((_timespan) => _timespan - interval);
    }, interval);

    return () => {
      clearInterval(intervalId);
    };
  }, [interval]);

  /* If the initial deadline value changes */
  useEffect(() => {
    setTimespan(new Date(deadline) - Date.now());
  }, [deadline]);

  return {
    days: Math.floor(timespan / DAY),
    hours: Math.floor((timespan / HOUR) % 24),
    minutes: Math.floor((timespan / MINUTE) % 60),
    seconds: Math.floor((timespan / SECOND) % 60)
  };
}

Then its simple to use:

const { days, hours, minutes, seconds } = useTimer("2022-12-31T23:59:59");

Raí B. Toffoletto • Jul 29 '22

Yes good point! But as far I remember it deviates very irregularly in the milliseconds, so I tend to ignore it unless it's crucial 😅. But thanks for the video link, I'll watch it to refresh my memory on the subject 😁.

In that case only one useEffect is needed:

useEffect(() => {
    const intervalId = setInterval(() => {
      setTimespan(new Date(deadline) - Date.now());
    }, interval);

    return () => {
      clearInterval(intervalId);
    };
  }, [deadline, interval]);

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE • Jul 28 '22

Wow! Thank you for your suggestion! Since my tutorial is a beginner tutorial, I won't change it, but will include your comment in the article, because it could be very important for those who want to write the code in a professional way and this comment must not be overlooked in any case!

I myself will study your solution to fully understand it. It's time for me to finally write code in a professional way! You really made my day, thanks again!

Red Ochsenbein (he/him) • Jul 27 '22 • Edited

May I suggest a few things?

Date.now() would do the trick instead of Date.parse(new Date()).
let interval could be const interval. It's never reassigned.
Since you already define deadline within the scope of Timer there is no need to use it as a parameter for the getTime function.
I'd probably only use one state called timeDiff and use an object in the state

const getTime = () => {
    const time = new Date(deadline) - new Date();

    setTimeDelta({
        days: Math.floor(time / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)),
        hours: Math.floor((time / (1000 * 60 * 60)) % 24),
        minutes: Math.floor((time / 1000 / 60) % 60),
        seconds: (Math.floor((time / 1000) % 60)),
    })
};

With React 18's Automatic Batching this is no longer that important, but I feel it's better to have less different state variables if they are always dependent.
Also this approach would make it easier to have really pure getTime function which only returns the object used to set the new state.

To repeat this function, we must clear the interval after each rendering using the clearInterval() function.

This is not entirely true: the returned function in useEffecxt is only called when the component is unmounted (or on changes in the deps, but since there are none in this case...)

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE • Jul 28 '22

Thank you so much for your suggestions, I will insert most of your suggestions (the ones I get 😅) right away!

Doh', I thought that I did not fully understand setInterval/clearInterval and useEffect. I will read about it again and update the information.

Thank you for helping me making this tutorial better, I really appreciate it.

Red Ochsenbein (he/him) • Jul 28 '22

If you have any questions feel free to reach out.

francoisaudic • Jul 27 '22

For the HTML, you could put a « timer » role and an attribute tabindex="0" on the container of the timer.

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE • Jul 28 '22

Shame on me. Thank you very much for this advice, Francois. I should indeed include accessible code in my (future) tutorials from the beginning, and not only for my accessibility articles themselves. I will do my research and implement it. I will keep you posted when I have revised the code.

Thank you for supporting me in getting better at accessibility every day.