Question

How does one convert a string of a date without a year to a JS Date object? And how does one convert a date string with a year and a time into a JS Date object?

Answer 1

Many different date formats can be converted to date objects just by passing them to the Date() constructor:

var date = new Date(datestring);

Your example date doesn’t work for two reasons. First, it doesn’t have a year. Second, there needs to be a space before “pm” (I’m not sure why).

// Wed May 27 2009 23:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
var date = new Date("2009/05/27 11:00 pm")

If the date formats you’re receiving are consistent, you can fix them up this way:

var datestring = "05/27 11:00pm";
var date = new Date("2009/" + datestring.replace(/\B[ap]m/i, " $&"));