Question

I am querying facebook graph api. It returns date in following format: 2012-01-23T23:52:29+0000.

I need to find difference of dates of this type in javascript. It’s not a valid date in javascript ( by Date.parse() or new Date() )

I am thinking of replacing 'T' with ' ' (a space), '-' with '/' and '+0000' with '' (empty string). Is this the only way? Or am I missing something here?

Also, if this is the only way, can someone give me a regex to replace all in one go?

Execution speed is my main concern.

Answer 1

I’d say yes to replacing - with /, since that’s that the ISO-whatever standard dictates (Facebook likes to screw things around, like <meta> tags with property attributes instead of name like they should be).

Keep the timezone part, since JS understands that and will handle it accordingly.

Overall, you want new Date(input.replace(/-/g,'/'));.

In response to comments, a better (more complete) solution would be:

new Date(input.replace(/-/g,'/').replace("T"," ").replace(/\+[0-9]+$/,''));