Question

I have a datetime string being provided to me in the following format:

yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss
2011-07-14 11:23:00

When attempting to parse it into a JavaScript date() object it fails. What is the best way to convert this into a format that JavaScript can understand?

The answers below suggest something like

var myDate = new Date('2011-07-14 11:23:00');

Which is what I was using. It appears this may be a browser issue. I’ve made a http://jsfiddle.net/czeBu/ for this. It works OK for me in Chrome. In Firefox 5.0.1 on OS X it returns Invalid Date.

Answer 1

The failure is up to the browser implementation’s handling of Date.parse and how they allow for date strings not conform the date standards

ECMAScript defines a string interchange format for date-times based upon a simplification of the ISO 8601 calendar date extended format.
The format is as follows: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ

So we can force your string into this

const getDateFromString = str => {
  const [date,time] = str.split(" ");
  // reformat string into YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ
  str = `${date}T${time}.000Z`
  return new Date(str);
};
let date = getDateFromString('2011-07-14 11:23:00');
console.log(date)

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Older answer:

As for your format, some OSX browsers insist on the dashes being slashes.

This works everywhere including Safari 5 and Firefox 5 on OS X.

UPDATE: Fx Quantum (54) has no need for the replace, but Safari 11 is still not happy unless you convert as below

var date_test = new Date("2011-07-14 11:23:00".replace(/-/g,"/"));
console.log(date_test);