Question

I have a mysql table with dates in it (format: yyy-mm-dd). I then retrieve the dates and save them, however in the procures I change the dates format to make the user viewing easier for the task at hand. My issue is that when I get dates that are too far in the future (out a few months) they change and fall a day behind (otherwise it works fine). I spent a lot of time reading up on how the javascript date conversion works but I still do not have a firm understanding. Without what i wrote the date always comes in after the conversion a day behind. Also I am located in ohio. Here is what I have:

    var x = offset*60000;  
    var time = new Date (item.start);
    var time2=time.getTime();
    var time3=time2+x;
    var start = $.datepicker.formatDate('D, d M, yy', new Date (time3));

what is the issue here? Also if you could give a quick explanation for my education, that would be great. Thanks.

Answer 1

The problem is that the format you are passing to the Date constructor does not seem valid according to – https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date (i.e. a version of the ISO8601 extended format) is a valid ES5 format but is not correctly parsed by the browser.

So something like this should be what you need:

http://jsfiddle.net/xfz6L/

var date_string = "2012-11-02";

var first_try = new Date(date_string);
alert(first_try.toDateString());

// The following is the code you would use
var date_split = date_string.split("-");
var second_try = new Date(date_split[0], +date_split[1]-1, date_split[2]);
alert(second_try.toDateString());

Since the problem seems to be that it is not a valid format not all browsers correctly parse the ISO8601 format, my solution is to use the string provided and manipulate it to work as a valid constructor.

The easiest way I can think of is passing the “year”, “month”, and “day” in that order to the constructor.

To do that, you need to split the string by - and then pass each array index to the constructor.

The reason I subtract “1” from the month is that the range is from 0 to 11.